How Like Hatred
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: LMNB, otherwise gen. Harry has learned that speaking in Parseltongue makes some people hate him and others fear him. He had not learned that it would make Draco go straight to his parents and tell them that he has reason to suspect "Harry Potter" is actually his missing twin brother. As far as Harry is concerned, life would be a lot better if he was the Heir of Slytherin.
1. Chapter 1

**Title: **How Like Hatred  
**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters; I am writing this story for fun and not profit.  
**Pairing: **Lucius/Narcissa, otherwise gen  
**Content Notes: **Angst, AU of Chamber of Secrets, mild violence  
**Wordcount: **This part 2800  
**Rating: **PG-13  
**Summary: **Harry has learned that speaking in Parseltongue makes some people hate him and others fear him. He had _not _learned that it would make Draco go straight to his parents and tell them that he has reason to suspect "Harry Potter" is actually his missing twin brother. As far as Harry is concerned, life would be a lot better if he was the Heir of Slytherin.  
**Author's Notes: **Another of my "From Samhain to the Solstice" fics, for agatag's request about Harry actually being a Malfoy. I'm afraid that I couldn't fulfill the request for a really long fic, but I won't rule out a sequel in the future. As requested, this fic focuses more on emotional fallout than plot. It will have three parts.

**How Like Hatred**

"I admit that you don't look like our son. But you are, Aldebaran."

"The awfulness of that name is a good reason for me not to be."

Mrs. Malfoy's eyes widened a little, and she leaned towards Harry where he sat on the bed in the hospital wing. "Do not be so disrespectful to me," she hissed. "I am your _mother_."

Harry folded his arms. Mrs. Malfoy was pretty intimidating, worse than Aunt Petunia had ever been. But that didn't matter. He wouldn't let it matter.

Draco Malfoy's eyes had gone very wide when Harry had hissed in Parseltongue at the dueling club. He had gone running from there as if his arse was on fire. Harry didn't mind admitting he had laughed about that.

But it had turned out that he'd gone to Floo his parents—where he had got access to a Floo, Harry didn't know, but he thought he could probably guess that it was Snape—and tell them that he thought Harry was his missing twin brother, who had apparently spoken in Parseltongue when he was little.

Then the Malfoy parents had shown up, and Harry had refused to listen. Sure, it was sad that apparently they'd had a kid who was kidnapped, but that didn't mean it was _him_.

"Ah, Mrs. Malfoy. I just heard. I think you are claiming that Mr. Potter is actually your son, Aldebaran Malfoy?"

Harry shivered at the sound of those names together. Really, it was just…ugh. But of course, it would probably be lower-class or something of the Malfoys to choose names for their children that people would actually want to be called.

"Yes, Headmaster." Mrs. Malfoy didn't turn a hair, just went on sitting there as if it was her right to stare at Harry. "We have every reason to believe so. He spoke in Parseltongue, and so did Draco's twin brother, who disappeared when he was just a few weeks old."

Professor Dumbledore walked over to join them. Harry looked at him gratefully. His eyes were twinkling, and he winked at Harry on the side of his face that was pointed away from Mrs. Malfoy. That must mean that he didn't believe a word of it, Harry thought. It was good to have the Headmaster on his side.

"Are you sure that your son spoke in Parseltongue, Mrs. Malfoy?" Dumbledore asked gently. "He would have been incredibly young to do so. The babbling of babies can sound like words, as I'm sure you know. And of course, Parseltongue is a genetic gift confined to the descendants of Salazar Slytherin, and no Malfoy has ever had it—"

"That is where you are wrong." Lucius Malfoy swept through the door of the hospital wing. Harry tensed instinctively. The last time he'd seen the man had been when he was insulting Mr. Weasley, after all.

This time, though, Mr. Malfoy had eyes only for Harry, the way Mrs. Malfoy did, although he was speaking to Professor Dumbledore. "One of the granddaughters of Salazar Slytherin changed her name and married into the Malfoy line when we arrived on English soil, to hide what she was. It was a time of particularly virulent prejudice against Parselmouths. Ever since then, the talent has shown up every few generations. But we have been intelligent enough to keep it quiet. It is a source of some prestige among those we trust, however."

"Great," Harry said. "It doesn't _matter_. I'm still a Potter, not a Malfoy. Or how do you explain this?" He gestured at his face, trying to cover everything, his glasses and his messy _dark _hair and his green eyes.

"Glamours," Mr. Malfoy said. "Illusions. They can be powerful and hard to break if set in childhood. Not to worry, Aldebaran."

"Stop _calling _me that!"

"For shame, Aldebaran." Mrs. Malfoy's voice was cold, and she caught Harry's eye and frowned sternly. Harry found that he really wanted to cower away from it. "Young men do not say such things. This rudeness must be a result of growing up with Muggles."

"Yeah, I did," Harry said, snatching at the words. "So even if I was your son, you wouldn't want me, right? Because I didn't grow up the way you wanted and I don't sound posh enough."

"That's not true." Mrs. Malfoy's face seemed to melt like a glacier. She smiled and reached out to put a hand on Harry's, and Harry caught his breath. It felt like he imagined a mother would, touching him. "We would want you no matter how you behaved. It is simply that polite young men do not do that, to any adults, so we will teach you the manners you missed out on learning."

Harry leaned back and shook off her touch. Sure, he would have liked a mother, but he _had _had a mum, and she had died for him. Harry owed her some loyalty. He ignored the stricken look that came over Mrs. Malfoy's face, and turned back to Mr. Malfoy.

"So if you claim that I'm your son, it should be pretty easy to break these spells, right?"

"It should indeed." Mr. Malfoy aimed his wand at Harry, and it took everything Harry had to sit still on the bed. But he reminded himself that Professor Dumbledore was right there and he would do something if Mr. Malfoy tried to hurt him. "_Finite sanguis potentem!_"

There was a flicker that seemed to strain the corners of the room as though the spell had really woven a huge spiderweb through the air, and then something pulled at the corners of Harry's face. He gritted his teeth. It didn't hurt as much as the times that Dudley and Piers had caught him and beat him up, or being thrown in the cupboard without meals.

When the sensation passed, Harry blinked and looked at the Malfoys. They wore unmistakable expressions of disappointment. Harry smiled a little. "I still look like me, right? Sorry that I'm not who you were looking for," he added, because he thought he could be a little gracious now that he'd won, and he did hope they found their kid. "Maybe you'll find him someday."

"Now that it has been proven that Harry is indeed a Potter," said Professor Dumbledore cheerfully, "I think he should get back to class."

But Mrs. Malfoy had abruptly stood, her eyes very wide. "Could he have?" she breathed. Then she brandished her own wand, and the incantation that came out sounded like it was in some other language, not Latin. Not that Harry knew Latin very well.

This time, the pulling sensation was brief, but there was a sharp, stinging sensation on his scalp that raced up and down. Harry gasped and buried his face in his hands. His eyes were stinging and tearing up, and he didn't want anyone to think he was crying. It didn't really _hurt_, it just pulled a bit, that was all.

When he looked up, his eyes weren't tearing up anymore, but there was something that still blurred his sight. Harry scrunched up his face and rubbed at his forehead. Had Mrs. Malfoy tried to blind him, or something?

"Oh, look at you, Aldebaran."

Harry jerked back in surprise as Mrs. Malfoy abruptly hugged him. Her embrace was warm and comforting, and yes, it was exactly the way he had sometimes seen Aunt Petunia hug Dudley. But he shrugged off the idea at once. That was ridiculous. Mrs. Malfoy wasn't his _mum_.

"Let's get those glasses off. They must be tremendously uncomfortable for you. No Malfoy has ever needed them. Or Black, for that matter."

Harry stared at her, not knowing what she was talking about, and Mrs. Malfoy whisked the glasses off his face. Harry opened his mouth to object that he wouldn't be able to see without them, and then closed it. The hospital wing around him was clear and shining, and he could see the faint smile on Mr. Malfoy's face and the shock on Professor Dumbledore's perfectly.

Unease grabbed him and strangled him so tightly that he couldn't breathe.

Mrs. Malfoy was laughing, slightly, her eyes wide open and her smile so bright that Harry thought it looked unnatural on her face. "Oh, Aldebaran!" And then she conjured a mirror, or took one out of her robe pockets for all he knew, and held it out to him.

Harry jerked back from it like he had from her hug. That wasn't _him _in the mirror, it was Malfoy! White-blond hair and grey eyes and somehow they had attached an illusion to his face to make him think—

Except for his clear vision. And the fact that a lightning-bolt scar still stood out on the forehead of the berk in the mirror.

Harry put down the mirror. "You're really desperate to pretend that I'm the son you lost, aren't you?" he asked, his eyes flitting back and forth between Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy.

"You _are _our son." Mrs. Malfoy stepped back to him and shaped the contours of his face with her hands. Harry tried to ignore the feeling that they really had changed and just shook his head.

"You can say whatever you want, but I'm not going to believe you."

"I, too, would like some reassurance that this is not a complex illusion." Professor Dumbledore seemed to have recovered from his initial shock and was smiling, but Harry took comfort in the fact that it was a steely smile. "While it is always a sad thing to lose a child, you cannot take over Harry's life and make him into a replacement for the son you lost."

"The spell I removed is one exclusive to the Black family," Mrs. Malfoy said, not bothering to look away from Harry as she answered Dumbledore. "I thought that perhaps Sirius Black might have put it on him. I knew the reversal charm, but there was no way the _true _illusion would have been removed without it."

"Who's Sirius Black?" Harry asked. Professor Dumbledore had narrowed his eyes, so he might know, but Harry didn't.

"He was your godfather—or at least, the man picked by your _supposed _parents to be your godfather." Mr. Malfoy's voice was as hard as Professor Dumbledore's smile. "He is a member of the Black family, as my wife also is. He betrayed the Potters when he was meant to keep the secret of their house from the Dark Lord, and he paid for it. He's in Azkaban. The wizarding prison," he added, with a slight sneer.

Harry braced himself with that sneer. He knew that it was his expression of confusion that had made Mr. Malfoy do it. That suggested that they would always despise him for what he didn't know, and it didn't matter if they were related or not.

"When you and Draco were only a few weeks old," Mrs. Malfoy whispered, "Sirius came to visit me. It was a tradition in my family for all the cousins who could to come and see the newest children who had Black blood in them and offer them a blessing. Sirius made all the right noises, and at the time, as far as I knew, he had always been kind to me, despite being on bad terms with his parents and his brother and one of my sisters. He—he made a comment about the security arrangements on the nursery, and laughed. He was always joking." Mrs. Malfoy closed her eyes. "Then you vanished a few days later. Of course I spoke to Sirius, because I thought he might have taken you for a prank. It was the sort of thing he would have done. But he didn't have you with him, and he let me search the rancid flat where he was staying."

"You're saying that he took me to my mum and dad and put this illusion on me," Harry said flatly, and then shook his head. "I'm talking like I _believe _you. Of course I don't."

"You will have to learn better manners, son." Mr. Malfoy had dropped all trace of the sneer, but Harry still watched him suspiciously. This didn't mean he was going to be fool enough to trust him. "We _are _your parents."

"No, you're not. You could still be lying. It's convenient that you're blaming someone who's in prison and can't defend himself, isn't it?"

"A stubborn, suspicious child," Mr. Malfoy said, and turned to Professor Dumbledore as if he was going to ignore Harry for the rest of the conversation. "There is a simple way to find out the truth, if you still doubt it. Permit your matron to draw blood and—"

"That is blood magic, Lucius, and I forbid it in Hogwarts."

Harry shrank back. There seemed to be a shadow looming around Professor Dumbledore, and his eyes were narrowed and his face harsh and fierce.

"Of course it is," Mr. Malfoy said. "But we have a right to authorize it for our child."

"Only if he _is _your child. You have not yet proven that to my satisfaction." Professor Dumbledore put his hand on Harry's shoulder, and Harry sighed in relief. He'd been afraid that people would ignore him all day, when this was his bloody _life._ "You will have to come up with another solution."

"Administer Veritaserum to Sirius Black. He will tell the truth."

"He would have to consent to it first, and you would need more proof than you have."

"_Men_," said Mrs. Malfoy, not quite under her breath. She placed her hand in her pocket and took out a diamond bracelet that Harry blinked at. All he could think was that it was so rich Aunt Petunia would probably have liked to own it, even if "freaks" had made it. It looked as though there was something in the middle of it, though, so you couldn't really wear it like a bracelet. Mrs. Malfoy held it up. "Professor Dumbledore, I think you recognize this."

For the first time, Professor Dumbledore hesitated. Then he nodded. "I saw it pass through the hands of several Malfoys and Black students in this school, although I must admit that I never saw it in its present form."

Dread pooling in his stomach, Harry stared at Mrs. Malfoy as she brought it over, smiling comfortingly at him. "We combined two bracelets to make this, Aldebaran," she explained, and turned it around. Harry could see that strands of diamonds joined in the middle to form two birds. One of them might have been a swan. "Only someone who has the blood of both families, or blood from one of them and a marriage bond to the other, can touch it. Not even my husband can. It will prove that you are who you really are if you can touch it."

"So, what happens if I touch it and I'm not a Malfoy or a Black? It stings me?" Harry was considering faking a reaction like that, if only to get them to leave him alone.

"No, it merely fails to show any magic. Do try it now, Aldebaran." Mrs. Malfoy held out the bracelet encouragingly.

And _that _reminded Harry of Aunt Petunia coaxing Dudley to eat. Harry concealed a shudder as he let his fingers glance gingerly along the joined birds in the middle of the diamond chains.

The bracelet lit up from within, a buzzing, ringing sphere of brilliance that made Harry lift his hand to shield his eyes. He paused when he noticed that his fingers were longer, too, and his skin paler.

"Why do I look like I've never spent any time in the sun?" he demanded.

"That is the mark of a Malfoy, that pale skin," Mr. Malfoy said. Harry peered at him warily. There was a weird tone in his voice, like he was enormously proud but trying not to show it. "Oh, Aldebaran…" He bowed his head. Harry now had the deeply uncomfortable feeling that Mr. Malfoy was trying not to cry or something.

But before he could say anything, Mrs. Malfoy was at him again, folding him in her arms and cuddling him to her chest. Harry sat stiffly, while his heart dropped straight down to his shoes.

He could see Professor Dumbledore's face over Mrs. Malfoy's shoulder. As he watched, all the twinkle went out in Professor Dumbledore's eyes. He bowed his head.

_Shit, shit, shit, _went back and forth in Harry's head. _Malfoy is my brother, and my parents hate Muggle and Weasleys, and I don't look like myself. _

_And my name is bloody _Aldebaran. _Ron is going to laugh so hard.  
_


	2. Chapter 2

Thank you for all the reviews!

_Part Two_

"But not really." Ron was backed up against the wall of the staircase that led to Gryffindor Tower, his eyes so wide that Harry was surprised that he hadn't sprained something. "You're _Malfoy_. Or his twin," he added, because Hermione had poked him in the side with an elbow, and Harry supposed it was about not supporting him. "Or you're Malfoy who put that scar on your head for a prank. Not Harry. Not _our _Harry."

Harry swallowed. He hated the feeling that he didn't belong to them anymore. "Apparently my real name is Aldebaran Malfoy—"

Ron snorted hard, and then clapped his hand over his mouth. Harry gave him a tentative smile that Ron didn't return.

"I felt the same way when I heard it," Harry agreed. "But somehow I got taken to my mum and—I mean, the Potters when I was a baby. They conducted some tests that proved I'm a Malfoy." Mr. Malfoy had done the blood magic after the bracelet test. Professor Dumbledore seemed to think he couldn't prevent Mr. Malfoy from doing it then, because the bracelet had proven that Harry really was this Aldebaran bloke. He seemed to be in shock, and had just stood back and watched numbly.

"How did it happen, though?" Hermione asked. She at least sounded curious instead of upset.

"They think that someone called Sirius Black took me. Apparently he was my godfather and Mrs. Malfoy's cousin, and he betrayed the—the _Potters _to Voldemort." Harry ignored Ron's flinch and took a deep breath. "Mrs. Malfoy said she heard something about how James Potter was infertile, but she'd ignored the rumors."

"That's it, though!" Ron broke in suddenly. "They're rumors! You can't trust her! She's probably lying about everything. And you saw the way Malfoy's dad went after my dad in the bookshop. How _can _you trust them when they're lying about everything?"

"They did tests that didn't lie—"

"Tests can be fooled," Ron said, with a loud scoff. "And why would you want to be a Malfoy anyway? Especially one with such a stupid name?"

"Ron!" Hermione said. She sighed and looked at Harry. "It's not as though I like Malfoys, Harry, but if the tests don't lie, then I think you should try to get to know them. It must be wonderful to have your parents really be alive."

"How can it be when they're like _that_?" Ron asked.

"I don't know," Harry said. "I just want you to know that I'm still me. I'm not going to suddenly start swaggering around with my nose in the air and believing in blood purity. I'm still here."

"No, you're not you," Ron said, shaking his head. "You don't look like Harry, and you don't talk like him, and Harry would never make any deals with a _Malfoy_, no matter what kind of family he wanted!"

"Ron!" Hermione said again. She sighed and reached out to take his arm, but Ron backed up and kept shaking his head.

"It just isn't _right_," he said. "I mean—Harry, you're _Harry, _not Aldebaran. You should have refused to let them turn your face that way and go with them, if you're really Harry. If you're going to stay Harry."

"I'll have you know—"

"No, _listen _to me." Ron was pale instead of red, which made Harry feel an uncomfortable stir in the bottom of his stomach. "Malfoys have never tried to be friends with Weasleys. You can't be my friend."

"But I am your friend!"

"That just proves that you didn't really know who you were, and neither did I." Ron turned and walked up the stairs to Gryffindor Tower, and Harry called after him. But Ron only said, when he was near the top of the stairs, "_My _Harry would have denied them."

"Well, excuse me for wanting a family!" Harry yelled, as finally his temper cracked. He had known Ron would take this badly, but he had never thought it would be _this _bad. "You have brothers and a sister and parents, and you act like you _despise _them! And you want me to turn my back on them just because of what I look like and what my name is! You're _stupid_!"

"Yeah, that's the way it is." Ron only nodded, looking abnormally calm. "Malfoys insult Weasleys."

He disappeared. Hermione looked torn between going after him and staying with Harry. Harry looked at her and sighed, and the anger drained out of him.

"I didn't mean to say that," he whispered. "But he wants things to be true that can't be true. I don't _like _the Malfoys, but I know they're going to fight for custody, and they're going to get it."

"Of course they will." Hermione came up and hugged him, lightly, probably sensing how stiff and uncomfortable he was. "It's not right that you should have to turn your back on them because Ron's upset. And—maybe he'll come around. You know, when he sees that you're not really turning into a different person because of the way you look."

Harry nodded, although he didn't really feel convinced. But what could he do? He'd explained things, and Ron had got upset and stormed off, and right now, he didn't have much more time to stay and explain things. Mrs. Malfoy had said that he could have half an hour to speak to his friends, but then they needed to leave. There was some kind of legal documentation they needed to do, and that could only be done at the Ministry.

"Aldebaran!"

Harry cringed. Hermione did at the same time, and smiled at him with her lip trembling. "Do you think you can get them to stop calling you by that name? It really is awful."

"I don't know if they will," Harry said, with a sigh. "As far as they're concerned, Harry is a name that my kidnappers gave me, and they don't want to use it."

"If they really love you and would do anything for you, then they'll get used to it."

Harry paused, and then had to smile. Hermione's idea was more than a little wonderful. At the same time, he didn't know if he wanted to ask anything of the Malfoys.

But he would have to. They were going to control his life from now on.

That made Harry lose the smile. After eleven years with the Dursleys, he knew the worst they could do. He hated it, but he could survive it. How was he going to cope with the Malfoys? Especially since he'd seen Mr. Malfoy and Draco in that shop selling Dark artifacts? What did they own? What spells would they use to punish him if he didn't do what they wanted?

At the same time, Harry knew that he couldn't just give up and go along with everything they wanted. That wasn't him. And he wasn't an obedient little doll like the Malfoys would probably want.

_Maybe if I bother them enough, they'll give me back my illusion and let everyone pretend that I'm just Harry Potter? _

It was an idea, Harry admitted, as Mrs. Malfoy called for him again and he hugged Hermione and then turned to go back down the stairs. It was definitely an idea.

* * *

"A Malfoy! Well, how wonderful indeed, how most wonderful!"

Minister Fudge had been saying some variation of that for the last hour, while they stood in a small room with a polished wooden table and chairs and waited for people called Aurors to bring in Sirius Black. Harry was getting tired of hearing it.

But he didn't say anything, because he was clinging to the hope that Black would say that the Malfoys were wrong, and he was really Harry Potter. He looked up sharply as the door opened and the Aurors, clad in scarlet robes, dragged in Black.

Harry shivered. The man looked insane. Matted black hair clumped around his face, and he had grey eyes that looked like Mrs. Malfoy's and Draco's. And Harry's, now. Harry shuddered a little.

The man glanced back and forth between them with no sign of recognition. Minister Fudge cleared his throat and adjusted his bowler hat. "I'm afraid that he's not really all that _sane_, Mr. Malfoy."

"That's all right." Mr. Malfoy waited until the Aurors left the room and then took out a sparkling vial from the corner of one pocket. "I assume that this stays between us, Minister?"

"Oh, well." Fudge had eyes that darted back and forth like a rabbit's when he was nervous. "The man didn't consent to Veritaserum, you know, Mr. Malfoy," he added, with a vague reproach.

"How could someone in the state he is in consent to anything?" Mr. Malfoy asked smoothly. "And we need answers."

"Yes," Draco said. He stood next to Harry, and he hadn't moved away from him since they came into this little room through the fireplace. Now he leaned heavily, so that Harry nearly staggered from the weight. _We're supposed to be twins, but he's taller and heavier than me. So maybe we're not twins? _"I want to know why he took my brother."

Harry sneaked a look at Draco. Why did he want Harry? Wouldn't he just enjoy being an only child, and see Harry as the competition? That was the way Dudley had always seen him.

Draco gave him a challenging stare, and Harry turned away, to look at Black again. It was still beyond weird to be reminded that the eyes looking at him now were the same color as his own.

He must have missed them pouring the Veritaserum down Black's throat, because Mr. Malfoy was taking back an empty vial. Black's head bobbed on his neck for a minute. Then he looked up with glazed eyes.

"Whazz?" he muttered.

Harry bit his lip, desperately afraid Black might not be able to talk. Then they would never get answers, and he would have to go along and be a Malfoy for the rest of his life.

Mr. Malfoy spoke. "State your name."

"Sirius Orion Black." The voice that emerged from Black's lips was unexpectedly strong and firm, nothing like the other. This time, Harry hoped that Mr. Malfoy hadn't created a potion that would just make Black repeat whatever the Malfoys wanted to hear. But no one else seemed surprised that he sounded that way.

"What are you in prison for?"

"The betrayal of James and Lily Potter."

Loathing squirmed in Harry's belly. Mrs. Malfoy had told him a little about the Death Eaters and the background of the crime that Black had been involved in. He couldn't believe he hadn't known about it before.

But, of course, he felt conflicted about it. Because it was terrible that the Potters had died, but they weren't really his parents, but they had died protecting him, but they had stolen him…

"I think we have established the baseline for the Veritaserum," said Mr. Malfoy, and then asked, "Did you steal our son, Aldebaran Malfoy, from his cradle and place him with the Potters?"

"Yes."

Harry felt as though someone had punched him. He staggered back and grabbed something. He thought it was the table, but then he realized he was leaning on Draco. He drew himself free, or tried, but Draco wrapped an arm around his shoulders and refused to let go.

"Why?" Mrs. Malfoy asked the question, soft and heartbroken. She touched Harry on the arm, as if she wanted to hover between him and Black.

"Lily and James wanted a child. They couldn't have one. They both got hit with curses during the war. They were both infertile." Black was staring straight ahead, reciting the story as if it had happened to someone else. "They wanted it desperately. It was destroying them. I would have done anything for James. And I knew that you had two children. Why did you need them both? One of them could be rescued. He could go up in a Light family and he could have parents who would really love him and not use him as a status symbol. So I stole him, and used an illusion spell, and Lily and James conducted the adoption ritual to make it permanent."

There was a dreadful silence in the room. Harry didn't think he'd heard a silence like that when they told him he was a Malfoy. He just stood there and stared, and Mrs. Malfoy hugged him from behind, her quiet tears falling on his head. Draco seemed frozen, clinging to Harry and not moving.

Mr. Malfoy was the one who stepped forwards, his face dark with rage.

"So you came to visit us. Why did you do that?"

"I knew Narcissa had had twins. I was thinking of taking one. What did you need with two children? You—"

"Yes, you said." Mr. Malfoy was almost hissing, although Harry didn't think it was Parseltongue. "How could you do that to your cousin? You were close when you were young."

"She married into the Malfoys. She wouldn't do that unless she'd given up on her heart and decided that only ambition mattered. She would have married someone else and been happy that way."

"You did it for the Potters?" Mrs. Malfoy had got her voice back, but her tears were still falling. Harry could feel them. He could feel that, and he could also feel a great numbness inside him.

"Yes. They were dying for want of a child. They were arguing all the time. I was afraid their marriage would end."

"Why did they agree?" Mr. Malfoy asked. He was coiled and quiet now, but he still reminded Harry of a snake. "I hated James Potter, but I would have thought he had more honor than that."

"All they wanted was someone to love. And once the illusion was in place, Harry looked like them. He was only a few weeks old. He could have been theirs. He was still innocent. They looked at him and they loved him at once."

Harry closed his eyes. So his parents were the way he'd always been told they were. They'd loved him at once. They had been willing to die for him.

He was aware of Mr. Malfoy asking Black other questions, and some answers, like how Black had helped them with the adoption ritual and told everyone who asked that Lily had simply been concealing her pregnancy so they wouldn't keep her from fighting in something called the "Order of the Phoenix." And how James Potter had named Harry his heir at once and bragged about him to his other friends, someone named Pettigrew and someone named Lupin.

But his head was spinning so badly that he didn't really listen. It was—it was so terrible. The Potters had loved and kidnapped him. Black had thought he was saving him and he'd kidnapped him. The Malfoys would have used him as a status symbol and they'd missed him.

Nothing made _sense. _He didn't know what to _do_.

He must have said something like that aloud, because Mrs. Malfoy bent down and whispered in his ear, "You don't have to do anything, Aldebaran. Just be yourself and let us love you and teach you how to be with us."

"You're my little brother," Draco added. "It doesn't matter who you were before or that you got stolen when you were little. That's not your fault."

Harry opened his mouth to argue that he was who he was and that he wouldn't change, and _not to call him Aldebaran, _but then shut his mouth again. Honestly, he was tired of arguing. He was tired of standing here and listening to Black. He just wanted to leave.

Mrs. Malfoy seemed to sense it. She stood up and murmured, "Lucius?" Mr. Malfoy turned in the middle of asking another question and looked at her. "I am going to take the boys back to Hogwarts. Aldebaran needs to rest. Draco has agreed to field the questions for right now."

Mr. Malfoy nodded and locked eyes with Harry. He gave him a fierce, proud smile and murmured, "You are handling this incredibly well. I am so glad you are home."

Just a few words, but they felt as if they were the strongest ones Harry had ever heard. He let Mrs. Malfoy lead him and Draco to the door. Draco still had his arm around Harry's shoulders.

Harry managed to ask a question when they were in a lift going back up through the Ministry. They weren't going to take the Floo back to Hogwarts, for some reason. "What's going to happen to Black?"

"He'll be in prison for the rest of his life," Mrs. Malfoy said quietly. "We thought about having him go through another trial, but there's no point. He already has the best sentence he can have. A Kiss from a Dementor would be too quick."

Harry assumed the Kiss was some kind of execution or something. He said nothing, though. His stomach was roiling, and he didn't know how to feel.

Black had done what he'd done for love of his best friend. The Potters had loved Harry. The Malfoys loved Harry, or they had loved the little baby they'd had and lost.

And then Black had betrayed the Potters, which maybe proved that love wasn't so deep after all.

Harry didn't know how to think, what to feel.

Mrs. Malfoy kept him close to her as they headed back through a huge space with a fountain in the center of it, whispering to him. "We'll go as slowly as you need to. We have the rest of your life, Aldebaran. Twelve years is going to be nothing to it."

Harry wanted to ask a million questions. Like how Mr. Malfoy had supposedly fought with Voldemort, and how he was going to make that work with Harry being Voldemort's enemy.

But it was too much for one day, and he got back to Hogwarts and walked up to Gryffindor Tower when he could finally get away from the Malfoys, and went up to his bed and drew the curtains to get away from the Gryffindors.

It was so much simpler, at last, to just be able to fall asleep.


	3. Chapter 3

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Part Three_

"This is your suite of rooms, Alde."

"Don't call me Alde," Harry muttered as he stared at the door Malfoy was holding open. Or, Draco, really, he supposed. He'd had to get used to calling the boy by that name because he threatened to tell his parents when Harry didn't. Plus, there were just too many Malfoys around for comfort if he kept trying to call them all by their last name.

Draco rolled his eyes. "You're my little brother. I'll call you whatever I want."

"Oh, then I can call you Firebreath?"

Draco's look of extreme horror was entertaining, but Mrs. Malfoy popped up behind Harry before he could bait Draco into continuing. "Aldebaran, you shouldn't fight with your brother. You don't know how deeply he's longed for you to come home."

Harry snapped his mouth shut. So this was going to be just like the Dursleys', he thought, with a pang he was surprised to feel. His "relative" got away with insulting him and Harry just had to bear it. He supposed he shouldn't have thought things would be different. The Malfoys had magic, but that was the only thing that really made them separate from Petunia and Vernon.

His thoughts went back to Ron and Hermione, who had been horrified and—well, horrified was still Ron's reaction, although Hermione was doing her best to support him. She said Ron would come back at some point and say Harry was still his friend. For now, though, that wasn't true.

Harry wished no one had ever discovered he wasn't Harry Potter.

He silently walked into the bedroom and stared around. It was too big and too bare. The walls were marble, he thought, but why did that matter when they were cold and empty? The windows looked out over a garden that was probably pretty in the summer, but bleak and barren now that it was almost Christmas. Professor Dumbledore hadn't been able to block the Malfoys when they filed for custody, but he had ensured that at least Harry didn't have to visit Malfoy Manor until the winter holiday.

Now, he had no choice.

"Aldebaran? We wanted to know how you would decorate your suites."

Harry sighed and turned to look at Mrs. Malfoy. She kept telling him to call her "Mum," but how could Harry, when half the time she was snapping at him about politeness and manners and posture and the way he ate and his background? He avoided it by just not calling her anything at all. "I don't know. I don't know anything about this."

Mrs. Malfoy frowned a little. "Well, of course this is very different than a Muggle—dwelling." Harry suspected that wasn't the word she'd been about to say. "But how did you decorate your room where you lived?"

Harry couldn't keep himself from tensing up at the question, which he knew she would notice. Still, the Malfoys knew nothing about the Dursleys except that they had been _Lily's _relatives and had given up custody of him without a protest. Harry would make sure it stayed that way.

"With shelves," Harry said, which was true. He said nothing else, and Mrs. Malfoy stepped into the room and gave Draco a little frown.

Apparently, that meant something Harry had no idea of, because Draco immediately left and shut the door behind him. Mrs. Malfoy sat down on the empty, sheet-less bed, and beckoned Harry towards her. Harry went, trailing a foot in the carpet. It was silver-colored, and so thick that he left a trail like someone crashing through a forest.

"Aldebaran, dear one," Mrs. Malfoy said, and then lifted him into her lap. Harry was so startled that he didn't fight, and then he was sitting there with Mrs. Malfoy's arms around him and her anxious face a few inches from his. "I would give anything to make you more comfortable, to make the kidnapping not have happened, but it did." Her hand smoothed his hair back, the straight, tameable white-blond hair Harry still couldn't get used to. Draco insisted on slicking his back with some potion, but Harry refused. "But how can we help you fit in better if you don't tell us what you're thinking?"

Harry just stared at the floor. Then he said, "Look. I know you love Draco more, because he's been here all along—"

He was going to explain how Draco being allowed to insult him however he liked was making him feel uncomfortable, but Mrs. Malfoy uttered a sharp sound of distress and tightened her arms around him.

"Oh, Aldebaran, not that, never that," she breathed into his ear, while Harry sat frozen, because things like this didn't _happen _to him. "I can see how you came to the conclusion that—oh, but it's _not true._ You were always wanted, always loved, always missed. That you came back…it's the greatest piece of good fortune we've ever had. I go to bed smiling every night now. I love you."

Harry just stared at her face, the face that looked like his but didn't _know _him. He swallowed and then said, "You love who I used to be. You love who I was for a few weeks. You don't know me now."

"Then help me know you. Tell me what's wrong and I'll light the stars on fire if I have to to make it better."

Harry gave a strangled gasp and slipped out of her embrace. He had the feeling that Mrs. Malfoy just barely kept herself from reaching after him. Harry paced slowly in circles, glancing back at her. Mrs. Malfoy bit her lip and clasped her arms to her sides.

"I like Muggles," Harry said. "The ones who raised me weren't the greatest, but I don't hate them. I _won't _hate them. And Hermione Granger is my friend." She was the only Gryffindor, other than Neville and the twins, who was still on his side, he thought. "Mal—I mean, Draco called her a _Mudblood. _I won't stand for that. And you act like all I have to do is look like the rest of you and get yelled at a few times about my manners, and I'll be a perfect little copy of you. I can't. I _won't_. I can't change who I was for twelve years!"

There was a silence after that. Mrs. Malfoy blinked a few times, and Harry thought he saw the shimmer of tears in her eyes. He turned away and said nothing. He hated to make her cry, but it was still true no matter what she said.

Mrs. Malfoy stood and came around, kneeling in front of him. Harry glanced at her reluctantly. She put her hands on his shoulders and leaned in and kissed his scar. Harry didn't flinch, the way he sometimes did when she tried to kiss his head or his cheek, or Mr. Malfoy put a hand on Harry's shoulder. Having someone touch his scar when most people tried to act like it didn't exist was…nice.

"I promise," Mrs. Malfoy whispered, "we won't try to make you hate Muggles. Your father is—unusual in his virulence. I don't hate Muggles myself, in general. I hate the ones who raised you for keeping you away from us. But I detest my cousin Sirius, and I detest the Potters, and I detest everyone who would come between me and my family. You can go on being friends with Miss Granger. She seems to be a good influence on you."

"Yeah, and are Draco and Mr. Malfoy going to agree to that?"

Mrs. Malfoy sighed and hugged him again. Harry felt the flutter of her eyelashes against his shoulder that probably meant she was closing her eyes. "It's a process of adaptation, Aldebaran. It will take time to get used to you, and time for you to get used to us. I know you still jump when we call you by name. But we want to call you that. We love you, we want you to love us. And I will tell your father and your brother to keep their mouths shut on certain words and certain attitudes."

"That doesn't mean they'll stop believing them, though."

"As you cannot change who you have been for twelve years overnight, Draco cannot change who he was for twelve years, either," Mrs. Malfoy explained, leaning back and studying Harry. "And your father has been as he is for much longer than that. Still, I will tell them to behave. In return, I ask that you give them a chance, and not insult your brother."

"Tell him to stop calling me Alde, then."

"Yes, I will." Mrs. Malfoy gave him a misty smile. "I cannot tell you what it means to me to see you standing here in this room. To know that you went through—what you went through, but now you are safe, and you are home."

Harry swallowed. "I wanted parents when I was growing up. I just thought I would never get them. And now I have a father who hates my best friend's family and a brother who was my rival for a year and a half. It's _weird._"

"Neither of those things is as important as the fact that they are your father and brother," Mrs. Malfoy said firmly. "I only ask that you give them a chance. Draco has heard stories of you all his life, which is the reason he can accept you at all, in the way that I'm sure he wouldn't have if we'd adopted another child. He'll want to make you comfortable, And let me speak with them about things like Draco insulting your friends and Lucius having his…beliefs. I am sure that I can persuade them to change for you."

"If they have to be persuaded to change, does it really matter? Is it real?"

"We all have to work on making this real," Mrs. Malfoy said, her arms tightening around him.

And that was true enough that Harry felt a little calmer, and let her talk with him about the kinds of pictures he might want to have on his walls, and whether he wanted to change the color of the carpet and the curtains on his bed.

* * *

"I…what?"

Harry stared at the enormous pile of gifts lying on the floor in front of him. There were two piles, but while he had been sure that the Malfoys—his _mum and dad, _that was so _weird_—wanted to spoil him, he had naturally walked towards the smaller one, assuming the bigger one was for Draco. It was beyond strange to think that the bigger one was for him.

Even stranger, Draco was grinning smugly at him. "I added a few things to the pile for you, Aldebaran." At least he'd stopped with the stupid nickname, even if it meant that Harry had to hear his awful _full _name even more often.

Harry glanced over his shoulder. They were in the middle of an enormous drawing room with so many mirrors on the walls that their reflections flashed distractingly back and forth, and which was decorated with all kinds of tree branches. Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy stood behind him and smiled the way Uncle Vernon had when he got a new car. They nodded encouragingly at the pile, which was decorated with more branches, and what looked like a pile of ivy.

"Come on," Draco said. "What, did you never do this before?"

"Draco," Mrs. Malfoy chided. Draco sat down with a huff and reached for the top present on his pile.

Harry sat down slowly in front of his. He'd have expected all the presents to be wrapped in green and silver, or maybe white and silver, which were the dominant colors in Malfoy Manor, but it seemed that _his parents _had found at least one variation of every single color. They were all different sizes and shapes, and all different paper.

"I never did get to do this before," he whispered, and then he tore open the first present, which turned out to be a thick woolen cloak, pure white wool with a huge silver Malfoy swan on the back. The swan was part of the family crest, which Mr. Malfoy was teaching him about. Harry swung it around his shoulders, and gasped aloud at how warm it was.

"Imbued with a permanent Heating Charm," Mr. Malfoy said, sitting down behind him on a silver thing that was called a chaise long-goo or something like that. "We want you to be warm in the storms of life, Aldebaran."

Harry looked down and touched the cloak so that he didn't have to show his face.

The present Draco was holding up was a similar cloak, but it had an underlining of green, so Harry watched it without envy. Mr. Malfoy had had a talk with him the other day that had seemed obscure, but Harry had finally worked it out: Mr. Malfoy was trying to ask if he was really happy in Gryffindor House or wanted to transfer to Slytherin.

Harry had firmly and clearly refused to leave his House. Yes, some of the other Gryffindors were being idiots right now, but he could still deal with that. He could deal with it pretty well if he gave up on hoping for Ron to talk to him each time he walked into the common room. Right now, Ron wouldn't do that. Harry had to accept that and go on.

"And _look_," Draco sang out as he took another box off the top of the pile and opened it to reveal a huge assortment of chocolates. "The best of Honeydukes!"

"That's the sweet shop in Hogsmeade, right?" Harry had seen a box on his pile that was probably the chocolates for him, but he ignored it and poked curiously at a package that looked like a broom but was only about half the length. A camera flash went off next to him and he looked up self-consciously.

Mrs. Malfoy was lowering the camera, smiling at him. "I just wanted to have a photograph of both of you," she explained. "Before this, we only had a few pictures of you right after you were born, Aldebaran."

Harry nibbled his lip. The smile on Mrs. Malfoy's face was so sincere, or at least it looked like it, and Mr. Malfoy was also beaming as he sat there with a cup of tea….They looked ordinary right now, even though Harry knew they really weren't. Maybe now was a good time to ask.

"Could you please call me Harry?" he asked. Mrs. Malfoy's face darkened with a shadow of pain, and Harry had to turn away from her, but he faced Mr. Malfoy. "It's just—I really, really can't get used to that name."

"It is the name of a star," Mrs. Malfoy said in a low voice. "And it had never been used before in the Black family, just as no twin sons had been born to my branch of the family in recorded history. You're unique, Aldebaran. That was the only reason I called you that."

"I know," Harry said. "And I appreciate that you wanted to make me unique." The words felt stiff on his lips, but who knew? Maybe the Malfoys would respect them better than they would less formal words. "But…it's just too much. And even my best friend finds it laughable."

"Weasley can—" Draco interrupted in a hostile tone.

"No, even Hermione does, and she's pretty open-minded. Please?"

The Malfoys exchanged glances. Then Mr. Malfoy leaned forwards and said, "I have been thinking along the same lines. Not that the name was too much, but that it was too much for you. You have grown up very differently. We do not want to pay tribute to your kidnappers or the Muggles who raised you, but neither do we want to cause you pain. And you are so different from our Draco. We want to pay tribute to who you are." Mr. Malfoy took a deep breath, as if saying all that had been painful for him. Harry thought it probably had been.

"A compromise is possible," said Mrs. Malfoy. There was a wistful tone in her voice, but Harry forced himself to ignore it. He would probably start worrying about whether he was making everyone happy, and this wasn't the time for that. "What about Henry? That has Harry as a nickname, but we wouldn't have to call you by it all the time. And you could keep Aldebaran as a middle name."

Harry thought about it. He knew that they would never agree to keeping James as his middle name, and he could see why. Harry had his own memories of James Potter, or thoughts about him, but of course the Malfoys would never share them.

"Does it matter that I'd be Henry Malfoy?" Harry asked. Mrs. Malfoy had told him that she had chosen her twins' names for the way they sounded with Malfoy, and he almost thought this might be too simple, or too lower-class, or _something_.

But Mrs. Malfoy gave him a soft smile. "There was an ancestor of yours, a long time ago, who carried that name, during the Norman invasion," she said. "Well, he was Henri Malfoy, but it amounts to the same thing. Yes, Henry. We love you no matter what you're called, and—and perhaps it's time to let go of the fantasy that things can be exactly the way they were if we just call you Aldebaran. Things are never going to be exactly the way they were. What I want is here, now, with you."

Harry beamed at her. Mrs. Malfoy caught her breath, and Harry realized it was probably the first time he had smiled at her with any meaning behind it since she had found out who he really was.

_Who he really was. _Harry thought about it as he went back to the pile of presents, at Draco's loud insistence. Maybe who he really was was some kind of combination, the person he used to be and the person he was when he was born and the person he would be going forwards.

And if that was the case, then it really was the best decision for all of them for him to be Henry Malfoy. The compromise, not the perfect thing, but the combination.

He glanced up in time to see Mr. Malfoy nodding in response to something Mrs. Malfoy had said. Maybe, with more time, he could think of them as his parents.

"I removed it from the school," Mr. Malfoy was saying now. "Everything has changed. The—obligations that we thought we had are no longer there. Our family has to come first."

Mrs. Malfoy closed her eyes. Harry had the impression she was enormously relieved, although of course he didn't really know why.

But he would learn why. And it sounded like it was good, whatever "it" was that Mr. Malfoy had taken away from the school.

"I got a bigger book than you!"

Harry turned back to Draco, who was smiling at him with a sharp edge, and opened the package that looked like a half-size broom. It turned out to be exactly that, but it was a Nimbus 2001 that sprang back to full size once the paper was removed.

"_I _already have one of those," Draco sniffed.

"Yes, but who's going to defeat you as Seeker on one of these?" Harry countered, and laughed when he saw Draco scowl.

Mrs. Malfoy took another picture.

Mr. Malfoy leaned back in his chair and looked content with the world.

_Maybe, someday, _Harry thought, _I will be, too._


	4. A Name Like Henry, Part One

This begins the second part of the story. When Harry goes back to school after Christmas holidays as Henry Malfoy, he has to cope with friends, professors, and just about everyone else having an opinion on his new name and appearance. And that's not to mention his smotheringly overprotective family.  
**Author's Notes: **This one will have three parts and be posted over the new few days as part of my "From Litha to Lammas" fic series being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August this year.

**A Name Like Henry**

Harry stared into the mirror and sighed. He had darkened his hair with a spell that he'd deliberately looked up in the library, but he still didn't really look like himself—well, the way he _used _to look before this all happened. The shape of his face was different, and he had a longer nose.

And there were the grey eyes.

"Henry, what are you doing?"

Harry glanced over his shoulder at Draco, who was leaning in the doorway of Harry's bathroom and staring at him. "Trying to make myself look more like myself."

"But this is the way you look." Draco came up beside him so there were two slightly different faces in the mirror. "You're my twin brother. And I know you're uncomfortable," he continued in a slightly gentler voice, slinging his arm around Harry's shoulders. "But we compromised on your name, so we can compromise on your looks, too, right? And I'll protect you from all the nasty bullies at school."

Harry scowled at him. "You're taking this big brother stuff too seriously for someone who's only three minutes older."

"It's a whole _four _minutes, Mother says." Draco sniffed. "And look, I'm bigger anyway." He stood on his toes to loom over Harry.

Harry rolled his eyes. He started to say something else, but Draco interrupted. "Are you going to tell us what happened to cause that?"

"Huh? No one cursed me to make me like that, if you mean that. Anyway, until this year you would have been the most likely to curse me like that."

Draco snorted. "No, I didn't mean that. I remember that you were a tiny thing when you showed up at the Feast."

"I was _not _a tiny thing—"

"So it must have been something that happened before Hogwarts, with _them_." Draco never referred to the Dursleys by name. Then again, Harry thought, he couldn't remember if he'd told his brother what it was. "What happened?"

Harry folded his arms. He knew what would happen if he told them that it was probably due to the Dursleys withholding food from him. Mrs. Malfoy would fuss over him, and Draco would step up the "big brother" nonsense until it was unbearable. And then Mr. Malfoy would probably go and try to kill the Dursleys or something.

Harry was coming to accept, slowly, that they were his family, but he wasn't going to be responsible for something happening to innocent people. Well, mostly innocent. Well, innocent some of the time, anyway. Well, Dudley at least wasn't the one who didn't give him food, that was Uncle Vernon.

"Heeeenry."

"If you ever want Parkinson to notice you, don't whinge like that in front of her," Harry said, raising his eyebrows.

Draco narrowed his eyes. "You know perfectly well I don't want to date her. And _I _know perfectly well what you're doing. Deflecting. I want you to tell me what happened with those—Muggles. Tell me."

Harry shook his head. "I don't have to if I don't want to," he added, when he saw Draco opening his mouth again. "Mother said I don't have to." He was always careful to call Mrs. Malfoy Mother in front of Draco, to spare himself the lecture that he'd get otherwise. But he thought of her as Mrs. Malfoy in his head.

Draco opened his mouth, then shut it again, and suddenly gave him a look that was so unhappy Harry blinked. He'd once thought he would never see anything like that on Draco bloody Malfoy's face.

"I'm worried about you," Draco whispered. "I just want to know what happened and help you, Henry."

Harry sighed and thought about saying that that name was part of the problem. He was Henry Malfoy to the Malfoys. He understood why, because someone named Sirius Black he'd never heard of before had talked under Veritaserum about stealing him away from the Malfoys and giving him to his mum and dad—the Potters. They didn't want to call him Harry when it reminded them of the kidnapping.

But Harry thought of himself that way. He would probably always think of himself that way. He appreciated what the Malfoys were trying to do, but it was—weird. Not him.

"Maybe someday I'll feel like telling you," he said, and it wasn't even a lie. Maybe someday he would.

He just didn't think it was likely.

* * *

"Harry."

Harry gave Ron a tense smile. They hadn't got along as well as before, not since Harry had found out he was a Malfoy. "Hi, Ron."

Ron stared at him for a second, then looked at the floor between his feet. They were on the Hogwarts Express, the train shaking a little as it rushed north. Harry had insisted on sitting in a compartment by himself, although he'd only managed that after like sixty warnings from Draco about what he should do if someone bothered him and a promise to come back in a little while.

Ron moved a toe back and forth. Then he gave a great sigh and came in and sat down on the seat across from Harry.

Harry let his smile widen hopefully. Ron peered at him out of the corner of his eye, then looked away again.

"You look like him when you smile," he whispered. "But not the rest of the time."

"I'm sorry, Ron. I'm _trying._ But I'm still me. Still Harry."

"But Malfoy."

"Yeah." Harry leaned forwards a little. "Look, can we try to play chess or something? Maybe that'll help us remember what it's like to be friends."

Ron went back to fiddling with the cuffs of his jumper. Scabbers snoozed in his lap. "Your dad attacked my dad in the bookshop a few months ago," he muttered. "How am I supposed to forget that?"

Harry discovered a sudden edge of irritation that he hadn't known was there. He sat back and scowled at Ron, who blinked at him in surprise. "What the hell am I supposed to do?" Harry snapped, partially happy when he remembered how Mr. Malfoy would frown at him if he swore like that. "I can't get out of their custody, and I can't go back to just being Harry Potter. My godfather _kidnapped _me, Ron! My parents weren't my parents! Don't you think I'm upset about this, too? But I can't _change _things. And I think I have more right to be upset about that than you do about a fight in a bookshop."

Ron was blinking rapidly at him. Harry leaned forwards. "If you don't want to be my friend, don't be my friend," he said, and he knew he sounded tired. "I'll—go sit with Hermione and the twins or something." He started to stand up.

"Wait, Harry." Ron reached his hand out, and Harry paused. He wanted to be friends with Ron _so badly._ He just couldn't stand to hear all the "evil" things his parents had done before he even knew they were his parents. It wasn't like Harry had been lying on purpose about who he was.

"I look at you and I see Draco," Ron whispered. "I see the man who tried to get my father sacked. I see all the people I've been taught to hate. How can I just get over that overnight?"

"I don't expect you to," Harry said, turning around and frowning at him. "But it's been more than two months now, Ron, and if you're just going to mutter about me being evil or something, what friendship do we have? I don't have to put up with someone who glares at me and is waiting for me to turn out not to be a real Gryffindor or something."

He'd actually had a nightmare about that a week ago, where he told Mr. Malfoy that the Sorting Hat had wanted him in Slytherin and Mr. Malfoy made it happen. Harry was sick at the very thought. He wanted to go back to the Gryffindor common room. He wanted to listen to Hermione rant about some obscure point that she'd discovered in the index of _Hogwarts, a History._

He wanted Ron back.

Ron took a deep breath and looked at him. "I want you to be my friend, too."

"The way I am, or the way you wish I was?"

Ron flinched a little, but his eyes were earnest. "The way you are. The friend who laughed and played Exploding Snap with me in September, and went up against a giant chess set with me last year. I want—I know that I can't be friends with you unless I accept _all _of you, and if that means accepting you as a Malfoy, I'll do it."

Harry smiled at him, so happy that it felt as if he was choking on sunshine. "That's great, Ron. I want to be there with you, too." He came back into the compartment and sat down. "And we _should _play some chess, I think. Commemorate the game last year, huh?"

Ron chuckled and got out his chess set. Then he trounced Harry, the way he always did. Harry grinned at him, and Ron started lecturing him on all the ways that he could win "if you just paid attention, you can do it, Harry, I know you can."

* * *

"Henry?"

Harry started and looked up. It took him a minute. Not only had he been listening to Ron explain a few more rules of chess that he insisted were simple, but the name still didn't feel like his.

Draco stood in the door of the compartment, his face stiff. He stared at Ron, then nodded to Harry. "You should probably get your robes on, Henry. There was an announcement a minute ago that we're only about five minutes from Hogwarts." Then he shut the door behind him with a quietness that felt almost like he was leaving a funeral.

Harry scowled at the door before he stood up and reached for his robes. It wasn't like _Draco _had come back to the compartment to sit with Harry before Ron showed up, either. He'd left his trunk here and said that he would be "back in a little while," but he'd spent the entire ride with his friends, not his bloody twin brother.

"Weasley," Draco said, sounding as though he was about to choke, and then left.

"Henry?" Ron asked in a blank voice as he started getting his robes out of his trunk, too. Harry sighed, hoping they weren't going to have to have the argument all over again.

"It's what the Malfoys decided to call me," he explained as he dragged the robes over his head and straightened the collar around his neck. "I really, really hated the name Aldebaran." Ron snickered, and Harry smiled over his shoulder. "Yeah. But they didn't want to keep the name Harry because that's what my kidnappers called me."

"Kidnappers? Really?" Ron was looking at him with a half-open mouth. Harry nodded.

"Yeah, we went to the Ministry and they questioned someone named Sirius Black. Who's apparently my godfather?" Harry shook his head. The thought still bewildered him. "But he betrayed my parents—I mean, the Potters—and got sent to prison. But before he did that, he decided to kidnap one of the Malfoys' twins and give him to the Potters." It was still strange to realize that Harry was talking about _himself._ "They couldn't have kids, apparently."

"Wow." Ron tilted his head. "So Henry is sort of a compromise?"

"Yeah."

"Are you going to start going by that in Gryffindor?" Ron wrinkled his nose. "I reckon I can get used to it. It would be a little strange, though."

Harry shook his head. "I understand why Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy don't want to call me Harry, but I'm still going to go by that in Gryffindor. Just Draco and probably the professors have to call me Henry. I know Mr. Malfoy wrote them a letter about it. I think."

"And you're still going to call him Mr. Malfoy?" Ron seemed weirdly cheerful about that. "Not Dad?"

Harry gave a full-body shudder that he didn't have to feign. "It would still be strange. And even then, Draco doesn't call him _Dad. _It's always Father."

Ron nodded, thoughtful. "I reckon you didn't change that much after all," he said, with a hearty clap to Harry's shoulder, and they got ready to leave the train as it slowed down.

* * *

"Mr. Malfoy? If you would come with me, please."

Harry turned around and blinked in surprise when Professor McGonagall stopped him from going into the Great Hall. Ron already had, since he'd been in front of Harry, but Draco came to a silent stop behind him. He really had a penetrating stare when he wanted to.

"Er, all right, Professor." Harry nodded to his brother and walked after her. Then he heard footsteps following him. He turned around and frowned at Draco.

Draco lifted his chin, although before he could say something, Professor McGonagall cut in. "I assure you, Mr. Malfoy, I will return…Aldebaran safely."

"Henry," Draco said firmly. "Did my father's owl not reach you, Professor? I know he was going to send an owl to all the professors telling them the name we compromised on, so they would address Henry properly if they had to distinguish between us."

Professor McGonagall blinked and pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. She looked honestly startled, which made part of Harry relax. She wasn't ignoring his compromise name on purpose. "Your pardon, Mr. Malfoy. I did receive an owl, but it came during a particularly busy time and I didn't read it thoroughly."

"Yes, professor. I would still like to come with my brother."

"This is a private matter, Mr. Malfoy. I promise that I will bring your brother with me when I go to the Great Hall a few minutes from now."

Draco glanced at Harry. Harry was startled when he realized that he was getting asked if _he _wanted Draco to come along. He shook his head, both in response to Draco's question and in response to his own thoughts. Sometimes he could be surprised at how caring the Malfoys were, despite everything.

Draco sighed loudly and looked at Professor McGonagall once. "Please be aware that we are highly protective of my younger brother, professor. He was already stolen from us once."

"_Mr._ Malfoy," McGonagall said, and she sounded genuinely shocked. "I hope you are not accusing me of kidnapping!"

"People who were really proud of being Gryffindors did, once," Draco said darkly, and clasped Harry's shoulder for a second before turning and going into the Great Hall.

Harry sighed and focused on the professor, who nodded and led him up to her office. She had a large tapestry on the wall of a lion streaking through a forest after what looked like a deer. Harry was looking at it when Professor McGonagall asked, "How are you, really, Harry?"

Harry turned around, wondering if he needed to be on his guard. But Professor McGonagall had taken off her hat and put it on her desk, and she just looked tired. He smiled at her. "I'm all right, professor."

"I wish there was something I could do to change things back to the way they were."

Harry just nodded, not saying anything. He wasn't sure that _he _wanted things to go back to the way they were. On the one hand, if they did, he would be Harry Potter again, with a normal name and the looks and friends he was used to. On the other hand, he would still be a kidnapped child, without parents, and with the fact that he'd have to go back to the Dursleys during the summer.

"I don't know that I can do anything, legally," Professor McGonagall continued, sticking her jaw out a little. "But if you are unhappy, I will do everything I can to remove you from the Malfoys' custody."

_She doesn't care whose kid I am. _That flowed through Harry like warm milk, and he thought it made his smile a little warmer, too. He shook his head. "No. I mean, it's still new, and we have to get used to each other. I have to get used to looking like this. But I think I made up with Ron on the train today, and I want to be a Gryffindor."

"If someone gives you trouble because of your family, you are to come to me at once, Mr. Potter." Professor McGonagall paused a moment, then sighed and said, "I mean, Mr. Malfoy. Do you understand?"

"Thanks, professor," Harry said, and beamed at her. "But Ron was the only one who was saying things I really minded, and like I said, I think I made up with him."

Professor McGonagall nodded. "That is good news, Mr. Malfoy. I would hate to hear that you lost your oldest friendship because there was—nonsense in the past."

That was probably the only way she would ever refer to it, Harry thought. But that made him sigh with relief. He would be irritated if all the professors made as big a deal as his—his _family _did. "Thanks, professor. Um, one question?"

"Yes?"

"How are you going to distinguish between me and Draco in the classes we share? I mean, now that we have the same last name?"

"I presume that where I am _looking _will be sufficient distinction, Mr. Malfoy, as I am not in the habit of turning my back on my classes."

Harry nodded and left the office, both cowed and relieved. Professor McGonagall was going to be the same as ever, yes, but at least that meant at least one professor didn't plan to call him by the compromise of a first name he still didn't entirely like.

As he came down the last flight of stairs and turned towards the Great Hall, Harry jolted to a stop. Professor Snape was standing near the top of the staircase that led to the dungeons, staring at him.

His eyes were—devastated.

That was the only word Harry could come up with, but it wasn't one he _wanted _to come up with. He nodded briskly and strode past the professor towards the Great Hall, hoping that the man wouldn't try to speak to him.

He didn't. Harry slid in next to Ron at the Gryffindor table with a sigh, nodded to Draco, and began filling his plate.

"Have some potatoes, Harry," Ron said, with every indication of cheer, pushing the plate over.

Harry smiled, then. Yes, everything was as normal as it was going to get.


	5. A Name Like Henry, Part Two

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Part Two_

"Mr. Malfoy, if I might have a moment of your time."

Snape's voice was as stiff as it always was around Harry. Harry reckoned that he couldn't have expected any differently. He nodded and turned around. Ron and Hermione tensed on either side of him, but Harry waved them off. "Would you tell Professor Sprout that I'm going to be late to Herbology?"

Hermione nodded, her eyes on fire as she looked at Snape. She had been more protective of Harry ever since he had discovered who he was and Snape had still refused to call him anything but "Potter" in the last Potions classes before the Christmas holiday.

Not that Harry had much minded that at the time, honestly. He still felt more like a Potter than a Malfoy.

When they were alone at the top of the staircase that led to the dungeons, the same place that Harry had seen Snape standing the other day, Snape cleared his throat, but said nothing. Harry waited almost a full minute, then asked, "Sir?"

And Snape said something so surprising that Harry was glad he wasn't nearer the stairs, or he would have fallen down them. "I must beg your pardon."

"What?" Harry gaped at him, and then snapped his mouth shut. In the back of his mind, he could hear Mrs. Malfoy chiding away about his lack of manners. Of course, a second later part of him wished he'd kept it open.

Snape didn't notice his rudeness. He was looking at Harry with eyes that Harry didn't think saw anything about him at all. "I had misconceptions," Snape breathed. "I thought you the son of an arrogant bully. James Potter made my life a hell when I was a Slytherin student. You had inherited that from him, I thought." He took a breath like a dragon about to light a whole wildfire. "I was wrong about you."

_Because being the son of a Death Eater is so much better? _Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy had been careful to tell him about Mr. Malfoy being under Imperius during the first war, but Harry knew when he was being fed a line of complete bollocks. However, he doubted that Snape wanted to hear about that. He probably already knew, anyway. Mr. Malfoy had been a Slytherin, and had hinted that he knew Snape.

Harry just nodded. "I—that's all right, sir. Everyone thought I was James Potter's son."

"I should have known. You're nothing like him."

Harry started to bristle automatically, and then remembered that he was doing it in defense of his kidnappers. One of them, anyway. He calmed down in confusion, and Snape went on talking, this time with eyes that did seem to see Harry.

"You have a grace about you that comes from your mother." For some reason, Snape swallowed then, a choking, clicking sound. Harry stared at him. Was Snape in love with Mrs. Malfoy? Harry did _not _want to hear about that. "And what I thought of as arrogance was self-protection."

Harry's worries switched towards what Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy might have said about him to Snape. "I, well, thanks, but I should be getting along to Herbology," he gabbled, taking a long step backwards.

"I wished you to know," Snape said in a low, passionate voice that Harry thought would probably haunt his nightmares, "that I made an Unbreakable Vow to protect Lily Potter's son. But I would never have done it if I had thought the Potters capable of kidnapping a child."

Harry blinked at him. "Why did you do it in the first place, sir?"

"Ah, Harry, Severus! I had hoped I would find you together. I wanted to speak to you both."

Harry smiled at Headmaster Dumbledore as he walked out of the Great Hall, but Snape twitched. He looked as if he had wanted to go on speaking to Harry in private. Well, Harry was thinking that it was probably a good thing they'd been interrupted. Snape wanted to say weird things, and was probably going to go on to _do _weird things in a minute.

"Could you come to my office?" the Headmaster asked, his eyes shining, and Harry was glad to see that he looked happier than he had right after he found out Harry was a Malfoy. No one had known about that except Sirius Black and his pa—the Potters, so it wasn't fair for Headmaster Dumbledore to blame himself.

"Henry."

Harry blinked and turned to look at Professor Snape. Headmaster Dumbledore only smiled a little. "What was that, Severus?"

"Henry," said Professor Snape strongly, his head up and his eyes pinning Harry so fiercely that he squirmed a little. "I received the letter from _his family _as I'm sure you did, Headmaster. In the rare circumstances when we might need to address the younger Mr. Malfoy by his first name, his parents have said he'll be going by Henry."

The sheer _wrongness _of hearing Snape stick up for him made Harry say hastily, "That's the compromise we came up with, sir. I really didn't like Aldebaran. But my friends still call me Harry."

"And I hope we will always be friends, Harry." The Headmaster stretched out his arm, his robe sweeping from it, making a motion of invitation. "Now, will you come with me?"

Professor Snape's eyes had cooled a little by the time he turned to look at Harry. Harry shrugged, although he felt stung by it for reasons he didn't want to name.

He wasn't Harry Potter, but he was _Harry_ still, and being a Malfoy, let alone Henry, would have to take time.

* * *

"I'll be sure to tell Professor Sprout where you were, Harry, so you don't get in trouble. And I believe the next class you have is with Severus, so you'll be able to speed right along to it."

Harry just nodded as he watched Headmaster Dumbledore make tea. He was humming under his breath, nearly as loudly as the silver machines all around him whirred. There was a beautiful scarlet bird with some golden plumes sitting on a perch, who had sung to welcome them when they came into the office and who Headmaster Dumbledore said was a phoenix.

Professor Snape was sitting stiffly on the edge of his chair. He had refused the tea when the Headmaster offered it, so there were just two cups. Dumbledore handed one of them to Harry and said, "So, I assume that you have refused your father's offer to ensure that you could get into Slytherin House, hmmm?"

Professor Snape stared between them. "_What_?"

Harry held his head up. Mr. Malfoy had said a little about this, but not much. They still weren't all that comfortable around each other, most of the time. "Yes, he said that he could make sure that I had another chance to sit under the Sorting Hat," he said. "But I didn't want it, sir. Honestly. I'm very happy in Gryffindor House."

"I wish to understand this," Professor Snape said, looking now as if he wished he did have a teacup so he could use it to make noise. "Why in the world would—Mr. Malfoy be a candidate for Slytherin House? Just because of his heritage? There have never been such exceptions made before."

"They aren't common, but they have happened." Dumbledore waved his hand vaguely without taking his mildly interested gaze from Harry. "Besides, in this case, there is the fact that the Sorting Hat considered Mr. Malfoy for Slytherin originally, so this could be seen as restoring him to the original House he was destined for."

Now Professor Snape _really _looked as if he wanted to faint. "Is this because of—your heritage?" he asked, turning to stare at Harry directly.

Harry controlled the impulse to flinch. He really didn't think either of them meant him harm. "I don't think so, sir? The Sorting Hat just said that I would do well in Slytherin and I could be great. But I didn't want to be there."

"Why not?" Snape looked as if he was ready to believe that Harry was the son of James Potter all over again.

Harry coughed. "I had met, well, I met my brother on the train and he made fun of Ron. Ron was the first friend I ever had. So I didn't want to go into Slytherin because I knew I'd have to deal with Draco."

Snape closed his eyes. Harry half-hoped Draco was going to get a scolding later. As far as Harry was concerned, Draco deserved most of the scoldings he got.

"Bet that as it may," Headmaster Dumbledore said, and now he looked tired and old, "I am glad that you do not wish to change Houses, Harry—"

"Henry," Snape said.

"I already talked to you about that, sir." Harry glanced at him, and hoped that he made it a glance instead of a glare. Draco wouldn't let him hear the end of it if he thought Harry was rude to his Head of House.

Even though, most of the time, Snape was rude _first._

"It is inappropriate for a professor to be addressing you by a diminutive of your chosen first name." Snape folded his arms and leaned in to glare at the Headmaster, who had put down his own teacup and was watching everything as if it was a play.

"You said that you needed to talk to me, sir?" As far as Harry as concerned, they'd got off-topic. All this about Slytherin House and what name he should have and the rest of it was just rot. Harry turned to face the Headmaster, who, after a moment more of a staring contest with Snape, nodded and turned back to Harry with a smile.

"Yes." Dumbledore's face got really old all of a sudden, and he sighed. "You know that there was a reason Voldemort targeted you."

Snape hissed like he didn't like the name Voldemort. He could put up with it, Harry decided. "Yes, sir. But last year you said that I was too young to know that…"

He trailed off, and this time, Dumbledore filled in the silence. "Well, as it turns out, the reason may no longer apply, as you are not the Potter child all of us believed you to be." For a second, his eyes were bright and searching as they turned on Harry. "I never heard exactly what happened when you went to question Sirius Black in the Ministry."

"Headmaster." Snape sounded furious about something, but Harry didn't think he could guess what.

Harry sighed and said, "Black said that my par—I mean, the Potters couldn't have a child. So he thought he would steal one of Mrs. Malfoy's twins and give them one, so that at least that one could be raised to be a good person. I had the impression that he thought it was a good thing to do, and funny."

"Ah." Dumbledore seemed to age again. "Well, the people you think you know may surprise you at any time…"

"I _always _knew Black and Potter," Snape muttered, but he had his hands folded in his lap and didn't seem like he would stand up and strangle Harry even if he was furious about something or other.

"Yes, Severus," Headmaster Dumbledore said, in a quelling voice. He studied Harry, and then nodded. "I believe you deserve this knowledge. There was a prophecy that a child born at the end of July would defeat Voldemort."

Harry stared at him. "And I just got targeted because of _that_? With all the thousands of children who must have been born at the end of July?"

"A child born to parents who had thrice defied him. That did rather cut it down." But then the Headmaster sighed. "Except nothing fits, of course. I believe that you and young Mr. Malfoy were born in early June, and your parents did _not _defy Voldemort three times."

His eyes seemed to be asking a question, but Harry didn't know what it was. He just said, "Yeah, sir, it was early June."

Dumbledore nodded. "So while the prophecy does not appear to hold, you _did _survive an attack by Voldemort, and it is unlikely that he will let that go. So I wanted to let you know that some of the circumstances might have changed, but I am still here to support you and will be happy to provide any backup I can."

"Um. Thank you, sir." Harry thought back to one of Mr. Malfoy's tirades about Dumbledore that he'd witnessed and barely kept from shaking his head. His life was so strange now.

"Off to class, now, both of you," the Headmaster said, with a flap of his hand that seemed to say Snape was just another student. Harry shivered as he walked out the office door. It was bad enough dealing with Snape as a professor, but it would a ton worse if he was a student who Harry would probably be required to be polite to because, of course, he would be Draco's best friend.

"Henry! There you are!"

Harry looked down the corridor as he and Snape stepped out past the gargoyle, and blinked. "Draco? Aren't you supposed to be in Herbology?"

"So were you." Draco gave Professor Snape a suspicious glance. "When we realized you weren't there, Professor Sprout excused me to look for you."

"Oh." Harry supposed he still wasn't used to having a protective brother who followed him everywhere, or would have if they were in the same House and Harry was minded to put up with his nonsense. "I'm fine. I was just with the Headmaster. He wanted to speak to me and Professor Snape."

Professor Snape shook his head at that, and gave Harry one more inscrutable glance before disappearing down the corridor. Draco walked beside him determinedly as they went towards the Potions classroom.

"I appreciate you being here," Harry started, because one thing he had learned was that he _had _to show he appreciated Draco or nothing would get done, "but you don't have to hold my hand as if I was a baby, you know."

"I know." Draco's eyes were distant. "But I have to guard you."

"Draco, I'm _fine._"

"You got taken from us once, Henry. Who knows what other people are planning? It could happen again if we don't watch over you."

"Is that why there were Tracking Charms on my trunk and my clothes?"

"Oh. You found those?" Draco's casual act would have worked better if he hadn't stumbled to a stop for a second.

"Yes." Harry stopped and turned to face his brother. Draco did the same thing, and Harry sighed and patted him awkwardly on the shoulder. He still didn't really know what to _do _with his brother. Draco seemed to have no problem swinging his arm around Harry's shoulders and even hugging him sometimes, but Harry had never had anyone his own age to do that with. Dudley was hardly the hugging type, except in the sense of "I'll hold him still and you hit him."

"We just want to know where you are," Draco said quietly. "Like I said, what if someone else is planning to take you from us?"

"Who would this person be?" Harry folded his arms.

"I don't know." Draco's eyes were so haunted that he abruptly looked ten years older, a lot more like Mr. Malfoy. "But my mother trusted her cousin and invited him over to the house after we were born, and there weren't many people in that trusted little group. Someone else could be out there. Someone who doesn't think it's right that the _Boy-Who-Lived _is with the Malfoys. Even someone who doesn't think that it's right for the Malfoys to have a son who was instrumental in defeating the Dark Lord."

"His name is _Voldemort._"

Draco flinched hard enough to almost fall over, and shook his head as he turned away. "Whatever you say, Henry."

"Harry," Harry muttered, but he could tell from the set of Draco's back that he wasn't going to get Draco to say it. He sighed and followed him the rest of the way to the Potions classroom.

* * *

"You all right, mate?"

Harry nodded to Ron, and tried to ignore the feeling that he should be looking over at Draco on the Slytherin side of the room. He wasn't sure what would be worse at the moment, to see Draco looking back or to see him turned the other direction. "Fine. Professor Dumbledore wanted to talk to me about some things that have changed now that I'm a Malfoy."

"Oh, yeah." Ron sighed and drooped his shoulders for a second. Then he shook his head and went back to crushing dandelion roots with the side of the knife. Harry had showed him how to do that after some lessons he'd had himself from Mrs. Malfoy during the holiday, and it seemed to work better. "I know you're fine. It's just that—"

"Silence, Mr. Weasley."

Ron being Ron, he just waited until Professor Snape walked past, with yet another funny look in Harry's direction, and then went back to talking, more softly than before. "Halfway thought me and Fred and George were going to have to come get you out of prison with another flying car. But I suppose in Hogwarts there wouldn't be bars on the windows."

Harry grinned and started to answer, but Draco said loudly, "What?"

"Mr. Malfoy?" Professor Snape asked in surprise, looking over his shoulder.

Draco had slammed his knife down in the middle of the table and was staring directly at Ron. "_What _did you say?"

"I said that we would have had to get _Harry _out of prison the way we did over the summer—_oomph_!"

Harry had stomped on Ron's foot at the same time as Hermione had done it on the other side, but it was too late. Draco had gone paler than Harry knew was possible given the color of their skin, and was shaking his head a little, as if trying to bring something into focus that he could barely see.

"This is quite enough of an interruption to our Potions class," said Professor Snape, his voice tight and low. "Weasley, five points from Gryffindor for your outburst. The rest of you, _return _to your potions."

For a long moment, it seemed Draco was having a real struggle about whether he should, but in the end he picked up his knife and returned to cutting. Harry sighed in relief. With all luck, the comment would blow over, and he could tell Draco—when Draco had calmed down a little—that Ron was exaggerating.

"You _should _tell someone, you know," Hermione muttered from the other side of Ron.

Harry only nodded, and said nothing. Maybe he should, but he was going to choose when to do it, not have it happen because of a stray comment Ron had blurted out.

"Sorry, mate."

Harry shrugged with one shoulder at Ron. "It's fine. Not your fault."

Ron seemed happy enough with that, and went back to helping Harry make their potion. And if Harry was getting two concerned, narrow-eyed glances, one from the Gryffindor side and one from the Slytherin side, it wasn't like he had to turn and look at them.

* * *

Harry looked up sharply the next morning at breakfast. Draco was walking into the Great Hall and straight towards the Gryffindor table. That would have been all right, if a little weird, except Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy were behind him.

"Oh, shit," Harry said under his breath.

"Harry, language!" Then Hermione looked in the direction he had, and blinked. "They—don't look like they're here to bring a book you lost."

"They'd send an owl to do that," Harry said, and then became aware that he sounded inane. He had been too happy with the fact that Draco hadn't confronted him at the end of Potions yesterday. He should have _realized _something was a little off about that. He cleared his throat and stood up. "If you'll excuse me?"

The Malfoys were close enough to hear him make the excuse. Harry thought that maybe Mrs. Malfoy would smile because he'd been polite, but she only gave him a strained look and said, "Henry, please, we need to talk."

Harry grimaced and followed her and Mr. Malfoy towards the stairs that he knew would lead to the hospital wing. Draco fell into place behind him, and Harry shuddered once and then refused to look back at him. It was like being guarded and escorted along, the way the Aurors had brought Sirius Black into the Ministry.

He did _not _want to talk about this, but if he had to, he could at least be reasonable about it, and then everyone else would be reasonable about it, too.

Hopefully.


	6. A Name Like Henry, Part Three

Thank you again for all the reviews! This is the end of the second part of the story, but I certainly won't be opposed to continuing it in the future.

_Part Three_

"Why did you never tell us you were abused?"

Harry stared at Mr. Malfoy, who had begun the interrogation. _Not reasonable in any fashion, no. _"Because until this year I didn't know who I was? Why would I just randomly walk up to you in the Diagon Alley bookshop and start telling you?"

Mr. Malfoy's lips tightened. "You are being unreasonable, Henry. Please understood the question in the spirit it was meant."

"Then maybe you can sound less like you're accusing me of having abused myself and kept the secret just to annoy you. _Sir._"

There was a long pause. They were in the infirmary, the same place that Harry had had to find out he was Aldebaran Malfoy. At least that awful name was gone, but the tension in the air was the same as it had been then, and Mr. Malfoy had the same forbidding expression on his face that said he wouldn't be getting out of this.

Or maybe this was worse, because they looked hurt, but Harry didn't have the same feeling of anger to defend himself from their hurt. Before, he'd had no idea he was a Malfoy and he hadn't been delighted by the news, and he'd been sure that no one could blame him for not being delighted.

But now he felt the squirm in his stomach that said maybe he _should _have told them, _maybe _they would have understood.

"I know that you did not abuse yourself," Mrs. Malfoy said, her voice very soft. Mr. Malfoy sat back and seemed content to let her take over, but his eyes were still raking over Harry in a way that Harry very much did not like. "And I know this might seem unreasonable to you. You're not used to having adults care. But you're our _son_. We need to know."

Her voice was trembling by the time she got to the end of the sentence, and Harry glanced at her and—

Yeah. He was making his mother _cry._ Bloody hell.

Harry stared down at his pale hands and said, "I didn't tell you because I didn't want anyone to know. I didn't want to seem weak. And when people came near to guessing it before, they never did anything. They thought I was making things up. And I didn't know what you would do."

"If you thought we would not love you—"

Mrs. Malfoy had reached out for him. Harry sat back a little further, noting with some hope that Draco looked nearly as unhappy as he did. Good, big long emotional discussions weren't a Malfoy family _thing._

"Not that. I didn't know what you would do to the Dursleys. I know you hate Muggles." He looked at Mr. Malfoy. "I thought you were going to torture or kill them. I know what it's like being an orphan, and I have a cousin—I mean, someone I thought was a cousin. I wouldn't want to have Dudley have that."

Mrs. Malfoy abruptly stopped reaching for him and sat back down. Harry watched her. He wondered if this was going to be one of those compromise things; Mrs. Malfoy had said over the Christmas holiday that Mr. Malfoy and Draco would try to compromise hating all Muggles and Muggleborns, and Harry would have to compromise, too. But Harry just couldn't compromise about making Dudley an orphan.

"It was your abuse," Mr. Malfoy said after a long moment of struggle where everyone watched him. "If you do not want me to harm your kidnapper's family, I will not." Harry nodded and kept quiet about the "kidnapper" thing. "But I do want to know what happened."

"Please, Henry," Mrs. Malfoy added. "When Draco sent us the letter yesterday—it was hard to sleep, thinking of all the horrible things that might have happened to you."

Harry sighed and glanced at Draco. He didn't look as if he'd been sleepless, but he caught Harry's eye and nodded emphatically in a way that said he wanted to know, too.

"They really hated me, and my magic," Harry said. "I didn't know about the magic part at first, though. I just knew that sometimes strange things would happen around me and I couldn't control them, and that was what got me called a freak."

Mrs. Malfoy's hand reached out and gripped Mr. Malfoy's tightly. Mr. Malfoy's lips looked as if they were on the verge of vanishing. "And what else happened?"

"They made me do chores." Harry didn't think that would be so bad given that the Malfoys had house-elves and they were all kept strictly away from the family. Draco probably didn't even know what the elves did on a daily basis. But they winced and gasped anyway. "Cooking and gardening and things like that. And they—well, I didn't have a bedroom for the first ten years I was there."

"Did you sleep in the kitchen?" Draco blurted, as if he had been on the verge of asking that for minutes.

Harry shook his head. "No. A cot in a cupboard under the stairs."

Mrs. Malfoy buried her head in Mr. Malfoy's shoulder. Draco got up and came over and hugged Harry. Harry gave him a hug back, confused, not knowing what to say. It felt like jagged shards of glass in his throat to be telling someone, but it was also _over. _

"I can't believe it," Draco was whispering over and over again when Harry paid attention to him. "I made fun of you and I acted like I was so much better than you, and—I can't believe it. I should never have teased you for being poor and not knowing anything last year. I'm sorry, Henry."

Harry opened his mouth to say that Draco sounded like he was only sorry because Harry had turned out to be his _brother _and Draco shouldn't make fun of people no matter how poor they were, but Mr. Malfoy spoke again. "And is that the end of it?"

Harry squirmed, his eyes on the floor. The cupboard was bad enough. Did he really have to tell the rest of it?

"Henry."

The name helped brace him, oddly, even though it still didn't feel like his name. The abuse had happened to Harry Potter, and Harry Potter would never be himself in the same way again. He would never have to go back to the Dursleys again.

And sooner or later, he did have to _trust _Mr. Malfoy when he said he wouldn't go torture and kill the Dursleys.

"They punished me sometimes by taking food away from me," he said. There was such absolute silence that he looked up, and had to look away again from the fury on Mr. Malfoy's face. Mrs. Malfoy still had her head buried.

Draco tightened his arms around Harry.

"How often?" Draco asked hoarsely.

Harry shook his head. "There was no pattern. When they got really upset, it was longer. They told me I wasn't going to have a meal for a week after I talked to a boa constrictor at a zoo and accidentally made the glass vanish so the snake got out and scared my cousin—I mean, Dudley. But they forgot about that a day later and fed me again because they wanted me to be strong enough to do chores. Then they would make me skip dinner if I burned something, or breakfast if they thought I was going to get 'spoiled' later with lunch at my primary school."

"And no one did anything." Mrs. Malfoy's voice sounded almost broken.

"No," Harry said, looking up. She was staring at him again, but tears still trembled in her eyes, and she was clutching Mr. Malfoy's hand like she wouldn't be able to stand up without it. "Sometimes a teacher asked me questions, but the Dursleys were pretty good at lying to get out of it. And my cousin made sure that other kids thought I was a freak, too."

"What did he do?"

Harry shrugged. "Chased me with his friends. Beat me up. Lied to get me in trouble. Made sure I had no friends."

"Shit," Draco said, and then cringed as Mr. Malfoy glared at him. "That's why you reacted so strongly to me taunting Weasley on the train. I thought you were exaggerating when you said he was your first friend, but…"

"He really was," Harry agreed quietly. Hesitantly, he hugged his brother back. He wondered why it was so much easier to think of Draco as his brother than it was to think of the Malfoys as his parents. Maybe just because he knew Draco better. "I didn't have anybody who would try and be loyal to me and care about me until then."

"We care about you, Henry," Mrs. Malfoy said, and then she stood up and walked over so she could hug both Draco and him. "So much."

Harry nodded and squirmed a little closer. He was finally beginning to believe that.

He knew it would take some time. For one thing, they hadn't really interacted with his friends yet. Mr. Malfoy and Draco would have to stop talking about Hermione like she was worthless, and Draco would have to stop taunting Ron.

But maybe they could be a family in a shorter time than he'd thought.

* * *

"Shouldn't I go back to Gryffindor Tower?" Harry asked, when he heard a distant rush of footsteps and realized it must be people going to dinner.

"We would like you to come home for tonight," Mr. Malfoy said, quietly but firmly. "There are still some conversations we would like to have, and it's better to have those conversations in the privacy of the Manor rather than at the school."

"I—is that even allowed?" Harry blinked. He thought it was unusual enough for parents to be allowed to visit their children during the school year. He couldn't remember ever seeing them here.

"It will be allowed because I request it." Mr. Malfoy stood. "Headmaster Dumbledore is still somewhat _distracted _by the part he thought our child had to play."

Harry frowned as he watched Mr. Malfoy go. "He's taking advantage of Headmaster Dumbledore being upset because he put me with the wrong people," he muttered.

"Of course he is." Mrs. Malfoy was just holding him tighter. "If everything had fallen out as it should have, your father would not have that pull over the Headmaster, Henry. But it fell out _this _way, and the least of the debt the Headmaster owes you is letting you spend some time with your family."

"Will Snape be upset with me?"

"What does Professor Snape have to say about it?" Mrs. Malfoy pulled back to stare at him.

"I don't know, he said something about making a vow to protect me because he thought I was a Potter, and then he insisted on coming with me to the Headmaster's office and saying that Professor Dumbledore should call me Henry."

"And when were you intending to tell us that you visited the Headmaster's office?"

"I just did," Harry pointed out, and hated the way that he got all stiff. Then again, he also hated the way that Mrs. Malfoy made it sound like it was his fault for not telling them about something that had only happened a few hours ago.

"Why was he calling you Harry?" Draco interrupted.

"Because he said we were friends." Harry would have said more, but Mrs. Malfoy drew in a sharp breath and shook her head. The tears had disappeared from her eyes, which Harry supposed was something to be grateful for.

"That man is trying to retain a degree of control over you that is inappropriate," she said. "He needs to be reminded that he is your Headmaster and your abuser, not your friend and not your Head of House."

"He's not my—"

Mr. Malfoy stepped back into the hospital wing, wearing a small, satisfied smile. "We have permission for Henry to come home with us for the night. He'll need to be back right after breakfast tomorrow, but with Floo, that's no problem."

"Ugh, I hate the Floo," Harry muttered.

He hadn't intended to be heard, but Mrs. Malfoy said, "All the more reason to get used to it, Henry. Something you haven't experienced often is bound to be difficult."

_Like being told that I'm part of a family and my name is Henry? _Harry thought, but he kept quiet as they escorted him over to the hospital wing's Floo and asked Madam Pomfrey for the powder.

The last thought had actually struck a spark inside him. He thought about it all the way through the Floo, and the horrible whirling, and the way that it spat him out of the fireplace onto the floor and Draco laughed at him and Mr. Malfoy cast a charm that cleaned the soot off him.

Maybe being Henry Malfoy _would _be more natural when he heard it more often. Maybe he should try to be around the people who said it, too, as long as they were kind to his friends, and not just the people who called him Harry.

Maybe.

* * *

"How worried were you that I would seek out and kill the Muggles, son?"

Harry refused to meet Mr. Malfoy's eyes for a few minutes. They were in the formal White Sitting Room where Harry had only been a few times, mostly for lessons in Malfoy history and wizarding politics. Mr. Malfoy had told him he didn't have to study beyond a certain level, but there were things he had to know that Harry Potter wouldn't have had any idea about.

"I was really convinced," Harry finally said.

"Why?"

Harry looked up. "Because—you followed Voldemort during the first war. I _know _that. And I know you said it was the Imperius Curse, but I don't believe you."

Mr. Malfoy gazed back at him thoughtfully. He looked a lot like Draco and less like him, Harry thought. Which was ridiculous, because he and Draco were identical, and he knew that. But it was the way it felt, anyway. As if Draco was closer to his father because he had grown up with him, and so his face was pointier and his eyes were colder like Mr. Malfoy's.

"Perhaps some aspects of this discussion should wait until you are older," Mr. Malfoy said. "But one thing I _can _tell you is that things have changed because of who people thought you were. I will no longer follow the Dark Lord, should he return. I will no longer freely use the word 'Mudblood' or attack Muggles."

"Because of me."

Mr. Malfoy nodded.

"Not because you decided on your own to be a good person."

Mr. Malfoy settled back on the couch with his arm stretched over the back of it. He wore dove-grey robes that were only a few shades darker than the couch. Harry thought he looked elegant, and also that he himself would never look that way.

"What does _good person _mean?" Mr. Malfoy murmured. "I did things that I am not proud of. On the other hand, I promise you that Headmaster Dumbledore and Professor Snape have done the same. They were allowed to find redemption. From what you said about the meeting in the Headmaster's office, you are even willing to allow Professor Snape a chance to reinvent himself with you, and he was horrible to you personally in a way that I was not. Why does he have the chance and I do not?"

"I—" Harry stopped, because when Mr. Malfoy put it that way, it didn't make a lot of sense.

Mr. Malfoy nodded calmly. "I know that part of it might be because he is a professor at your school whom you only have to deal with at certain times, and not your Head of House. I, on the other hand, am your father. Our connection is permanent, and one that cannot help but distress you."

"It's _weird_," Harry said firmly.

"I would like to ask you a question, Henry, and please answer me truthfully."

"Is this about the Dursleys?"

"It touches on them only indirectly." Mr. Malfoy sat there and was patient again until Harry nodded, at least. "Now. Did you have _any _adult who cared about you when you were younger? You mentioned that some of your teachers recognized something was wrong but your—keepers managed to talk themselves out of it. Was there anyone who maintained a relationship with you outside that? Any neighbor? Anyone who tried their best to teach you? Another Muggle, or even wizard or Squib, who watched over you?"

"Not unless you count Mrs. Figg. She was the neighbor that my rela—I mean, the Dursleys left me with when they didn't want to be bothered with me."

For some reason, Mr. Malfoy had gone absolutely still and tense, but Harry didn't know why. That was one of the least objectionable things the Dursleys had done, all told. "You said her name was Figg? Do you know what her first name was?"

"Arabella, I think?" In Harry's mind was a hazy memory of Aunt Petunia saying that once.

Mr. Malfoy closed his eyes. "I know her," he explained, while Harry was still staring at him wondering exactly what was going on. "A Squib, one of Dumbledore's followers. She was probably there to watch over to you." He sneered. "And it did nothing, of course."

"I never knew that," Harry said softly. Mrs. Figg had never spoken to him about the Dursleys' treatment of him. She might not know some of it, like the being in a cupboard part, but she would surely have seen him wearing big clothes and how thin he was?

There really _hadn't _been anyone who had cared about him before he came to Hogwarts.

Harry sat there with a sinking sensation inside him, and almost missed Mr. Malfoy's next question. "Sorry, sir, I didn't hear you," he said, shaking his head.

"You don't need to call me sir. I would be pleased if you would refer to me as Father."

Harry tightened his mouth and looked away. "Sorry. It's too soon."

Mr. Malfoy hesitated, then nodded. "All right. What happened during your first year at Hogwarts? Was there any adult who cared for you then? There were confusing rumors that, frankly, I didn't pay much attention to. Draco was jealous of you then, in your former identity, and spouted so much nonsense that I shut my ears to it."

Harry smiled fleetingly. Draco had been really different last year. "Well, I mean, Professor McGonagall cares, I think, but Ron and Hermione and I found out that someone was trying to steal the Philosopher's Stone from under the school, and we told her about it, and she just told us it was fine and we shouldn't worry about it. And of course it wasn't fine, and someone really _was _trying to steal it."

He looked up to find Mr. Malfoy with his hand over his face. "The Philosopher's Stone," he said flatly. "The thief was the Dark Lord?"

Harry nodded. "His spirit, anyway. He was possessing Professor Quirrell, the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor. No one noticed _that_, either," he added, a little disgusted. How stupid were the professors?

"How did you stop him?"

Harry described getting through the obstacle course with Ron and Hermione, making sure to talk about how much they had contributed and especially how Hermione had solved the Potions riddle right away. He wanted his family to start _respecting _his friends. Mr. Malfoy listened with a frown and nodded several times.

"That will make you more of a target when the Dark Lord returns," he said, when Harry had finished. "And that is all the more reason that I will not be going back to his service."

Harry swallowed. "Then—I can trust you? Not like the other adults?"

"Of course." Mr. Malfoy's voice was soft and hurt. "You're my son. I love you."

Harry studied his hands intently, but then Mr. Malfoy got up and came and knelt down in front of him, which was just sort of embarrassing, and put his hands over Harry's and looked him earnestly in the face.

"I know it's hard for you to hear that, Henry. But I _do _love you, and nothing pains me more than not having been there for the first eleven years of your life. I will trust you, and believe in you if want to tell me something, and give you everything I can give you to make up for not being there. I made mistakes, and more than mistakes. I ask that you give me the chance to make up for them."

Harry nodded. "All right. Thanks." He leaned in and gave Mr. Malfoy a stiff hug, hoping it wasn't too bad, thinking it probably was.

From the tight hug Mr. Malfoy gave him in return, he found nothing wrong with it. And Harry thought maybe, if things changed, that he could call the man "Father."

* * *

"Father told you that you were part of the family, right?"

"Yes," Harry said. He had left the dining room after dinner and promptly been ambushed by Draco. And his brother was clinging to him as if Harry was about to combust, or disappear, or something. Harry patted his back. "I mean, all of you have. You and Mother and Father." The names tasted salty and sour in his mouth, but he said them to please Draco.

"What is this all about?" he added, pulling back to study Draco, because he seemed more upset than he had been so far.

"My little brother was _abused._"

The way Draco said it should have made Harry feel strange again, like they were talking about someone who really wasn't him, but the stormy look in Draco's eyes made it different. He was staring at Harry, and he had his arms around him, and he really seemed _tormented. _Like he wanted to do something to help, but he knew there was no way he could go back in time and make the Dursleys be kind to Harry, the way he probably wanted. Or kidnap him back.

"You're my little brother," Draco said in a low voice. "I'm going to protect you, and I'm going to make up for what they did, and I'm going to show you that life is better now. All right? No matter what happens."

"All right," Harry said, touched despite himself. He had sometimes wanted siblings, but not often. Dealing with Dudley was enough trouble. But a sibling like _this_, he could want.

Draco hugged him again, fiercely, and then said, "Mother would like to see you in the little sitting room off her bedroom."

Then Draco turned around and ran away towards a part of the house that Harry knew held the library. Harry just blinked after him. Maybe Draco was as embarrassed as Harry sometimes got because of hugging?

_Maybe, _Harry thought, and headed towards what he hoped wouldn't be a confrontation.

* * *

Harry had privately wondered since he'd moved into Malfoy Manor during the Christmas holiday why Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy had separated bedrooms, but it didn't seem like something he could ask about, so he hadn't. Now he almost wished he had. Mrs. Malfoy was sitting in the little room—"little" meaning that it was almost the size of the Dursleys' kitchen and drawing room combined—with a pale face.

Harry bit his lip. "Um, do you want me to call a house-elf?" The Malfoys kept the house-elves so strictly away from humans that she probably didn't, but he didn't know how to revive her if she fainted.

"No," Mrs. Malfoy whispered. "Please, sit down."

Harry took a seat on a huge fluffy white chair a few feet away from her. She went on watching him like she was going to faint. This was as far away as she could get from the happy woman who had taken pictures of him at Christmas just a few weeks ago, and Harry didn't know what to _do._

"I am so sorry," Mrs. Malfoy whispered.

"Why? What the Dursleys did wasn't your fault."

"If I'd protected you better, if I'd made sure that the nursery was warded even against people who I trusted, then you would have grown up where you were supposed to grow up."

"It wasn't your fault," Harry repeated more strongly. "I think lots of people trusted Sirius Black, even when they shouldn't have. It was like—everything was just a joke to him." He swallowed. "And I hope that I'm not a disappointment to you because of where I was raised."

Mrs. Malfoy abruptly seemed to _see _him again, instead of just stare dreadfully at the wall. She gasped and got up to wrap her arms around him again, cradling him close. "No, of course not," she whispered. "Never, ever, Henry. Of course I wish you had been safe and known all along who you were and never been abused. But I could _never _be disappointed that you lived and that you are who you are."

_Yes, she is, or she would have let me keep the name Harry._

But even that voice wasn't as strong as it would have been a little while ago. Harry leaned himself against her, his _mother_, and let himself feel her. The warm arms hugging him and the warm breath against his hair. The fierce way she held him.

Would Lily Potter have held him like that, if she'd lived?

Harry didn't know, and he didn't want to think about it. He hugged Mrs. Malfoy back and tried not to think about "real" families and who he "really" was and whether he wanted to be Harry Potter or Henry Malfoy more. What mattered was that he was here, and he had a mother, and she was hugging him.

It was enough, for a while.

* * *

"Are you all right, Harry?"

Hermione's eyes were warm and sympathetic. Harry smiled at her and sat down next to her in Transfiguration. Ron was on the other side of the classroom saying something forceful to Seamus. Apparently he'd played some kind of prank on Ron at breakfast this morning, and Ron was saying he already had enough pranks from the twins to deal with.

"I am," Harry said, and opened his book. He'd done his Transfiguration essay over the Christmas holidays, and had Mr. Malfoy read it over and Mrs. Malfoy give him some tips that he could add in. He didn't think it was perfect, but it was better than a lot of the essays he'd written in the past.

"Why did you leave the school like that yesterday?"

"The remark Ron made in Potions," Harry said, lowering his voice. The last thing he wanted was to have the other students who seemed to have forgotten about it staring at him again. "Draco figured out from it that I'd been abused, and he went and told his parents. Then they wanted to talk to me, and, well, I got to spend the night at Malfoy Manor."

"They're your parents, too, aren't they?"

Hermione just meant the question to help him think, Harry knew, but he found himself pausing and staring down at his Transfiguration essay again. The words that Mr. Malfoy had read over with him. The information that Mrs. Malfoy had helped him add. The reminder of the chapters that Draco had talked about while sitting next to him.

_Were _they? Did he think of them that way?

He wanted to, was the answer. While at the same time he wanted to remain Harry Potter. He wanted to have a family and a brother and a home, but he also wanted his old name and his old looks and his old friends.

It seemed like he would get to keep "Harry" and his friends, if not the way he used to look. But what would happen with the family and the brother and the home, if he kept pushing them away? If he never got used to them?

Maybe, just like he needed to hear "Henry" more often to get used to that name, he needed to think of Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy as "Father" and "Mother" and Malfoy Manor as "home" to make them more familiar.

"Harry? I didn't mean to upset you. I know it's really fraught—"

"No, Hermione, it's okay," Harry reassured her, touching her shoulder. "You just gave me something to think about."

He watched Professor McGonagall sweep into the room. She began calling the roll just as she always did in the first class after a holiday, and she met his eyes and pronounced the name "Mr. Malfoy" without hesitation.

Could he do the same thing?

_I want to try, _Harry thought, and looked across the room to where Draco was sitting with the other Slytherins. Draco caught his eye and nodded, although Harry doubted he knew what he was really agreeing to. His brother just supported him because he was his brother, and Harry probably seemed to be looking for reassurance.

Maybe Harry would start relying on him for that reassurance.

Maybe, the next time a stranger introduced themselves to him, Harry would say that his name was "Henry Malfoy."

Maybe, tonight, he would write a letter with the names "Mother" and "Father" in it, and mean it.

He would try it. And see what happened.


	7. A Godfather Like Him, Part One

**Title: **A Godfather Like Him  
**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.  
**Pairing: **Background Lucius/Narcissa and mentions of Lily/James, otherwise gen  
**Content Notes: **Major AU (Harry is Draco's twin), not compliant with PoA, violence, angst, drama, family, discussion of canonical child abuse  
**Rating: **PG-13  
**Wordcount: **This part 2700  
**Summary: **Sequel to "How Like Hatred" and "A Name Like Henry." Harry comes home for the summer, and it really is a relief to be at Malfoy Manor with his parents and brother—at first. But then he finds out a secret that they've been keeping from him, and gets the news that Sirius Black has broken out of Azkaban. Plus he has to go a Mind-Healer. Harry isn't sure which one is worst, frankly.  
**Author's Notes: **Make sure you read the first two stories in the series before this one. I'm posting this as part of my "From Samhain to the Solstice" fic series, and it should have between four and six chapters.

**A Godfather Like Him**

"Mother will say if they can visit."

"They can visit." Harry scowled at his brother as they stepped off the train.

Draco pointed his nose at the train ceiling, and let Harry see that he'd done none too good at a job at cleaning out his nostrils that morning. "I know that _my _friends won't insult anyone. You can't say the same about Weasley."

"Ron wouldn't have said anything if you hadn't insulted his rat!"

"_Rat _is a misleading term. _Dust rag _would be more accurate."

Harry opened his mouth to retort, and Ron pushed past them hard enough to make it clear that he'd heard. His ears were bright red, and Scabbers was clinging to his shoulder and squeaking in alarm. Harry gave Draco a dirty look and ran after Ron, catching up with him just as he was getting off the train.

"Not right now, okay, mate?" Ron turned his head away from him.

Harry sighed. He knew Ron wasn't really upset about Scabbers. It was the reminder that he was poor, and even if Harry had turned out to be Henry Malfoy instead of Harry Potter, he'd just gone from one rich family to another. And Draco could say volumes about wealth with a _look._

"All right. Write to me when you can, okay? I want both you and Hermione to come over this summer."

Ron glanced at him, then nodded. "We'll see," he said, just before he saw his parents and ran towards them. Ginny tagged after him with a blush for Harry. Harry was glad that she at least seemed less shy and withdrawn than she had at the beginning of the year.

He shook his head as he watched Gilderoy Lockhart step off the train. It was kind of a pity that something terrible hadn't happened to him the way it had to Professor Quirrell, but Lockhart had announced that he wouldn't be coming back for a second year as the Defense professor because he had "fans to please and books to write." So there was that.

"Henry!"

Harry turned around more quickly at the sound of that name than he had at the beginning of the winter term, and saw Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy waving at him from the end of the platform. He started towards them, Hedwig flying out the train door ahead of him. She was just as happy _not _to be spending the summer in a cage.

_Mother and Father, _Harry reminded himself as he leaned close and let Mrs. Malfoy hug him. _I should think of them as Mother and Father when I'm around them._

It was still difficult, though. Especially if what Draco had said in their argument was true. From the way he was standing with his nose still in the air and his cheeks flushed a smug pink, he'd already told the Malfoys—_Mother and Father_—about it, and expected to get his way.

"Henry darling," Mrs. Malfoy said, gently putting her arm around his shoulders, "Draco told me that you'd like to invite some children from Slytherin over to the house during the summer and thought they might not be welcome. Of course they will be. I wanted to reassure you about that."

"They're _not _from Slytherin," Harry said, and tried to ignore the feeling of alarm that flashed through him when he saw how Mr. Malfoy's face changed. But he persisted, because being afraid of his own family wasn't going to help him achieve anything that he wanted. "They're Ron and Hermione. Maybe Neville. They're all from Gryffindor."

"The Ron boy is Arthur Weasley's youngest son?" Mr. Malfoy asked.

Harry threw him a defiant glance, remembering the way that Mr. Malfoy—_his father_—and Mr. Weasley had fought in the bookshop last summer. "Yes, he is. My best friend."

"And Hermione is Granger," Draco butted in, his face flushing with more than temper from the look of it. "From _no_ distinguished family."

"I really hoped that the next word out of your mouth isn't about to be _Mudblood_, Draco," Harry hissed, softly enough that most of the people passing by them on the platform wouldn't hear.

"Draco. What have I told you about that word?"

Mrs. Malfoy sounded gentle, but that tone held steel underneath. Harry knew that tone. It was the kind that she had used to tell Harry that he _would _be going to a Mind-Healer this summer. He sneered at Draco from behind his mother's back when Draco caught his eye.

"That I shouldn't say it in public."

"Well, don't," Harry snapped, although he felt a jolt of pain that apparently, Mrs. Malfoy hadn't just forbidden Draco from saying that word altogether. "And Neville is Neville Longbottom. I _like _them. They're my _friends. _If Draco can have his friends over, I don't see why I shouldn't be able to—"

"Of course, of course." Mr. Malfoy made a little patting motion on the air. "No one has said that you can't."

"Draco said you would say I can't!"

"They're _Gryffindors._"

"So _what_?"

"Not in public, boys," Mrs. Malfoy said, and led Harry away from the platform with her arm still around his shoulders. Harry tugged at his trunk, but Mrs. Malfoy lightened it with a tap of her wand, and a slight glance at Harry. "Why would you think we wouldn't let your friends come over?" she added, as Mr. Malfoy fell behind with Draco. Mr. Malfoy looked like he wanted to say something private to Harry's older brother. Harry viciously hoped that it would be about what a git Draco was.

"Because Draco said that you would be the one to give permission," Harry muttered, and ignored, as best as he could, the impulse to kick at the ground. Now that he came to think about it, Draco hadn't actually _said _that their parents would forbid it. He'd just implied it. "And he said that his friends wouldn't insult anyone, but Ron would. That was after he insulted Ron for being a Weasley."

Mrs. Malfoy shook her head. "The main problem I can see in our inviting Mr. Weasley over is the lack of permission from his parents, rather than Mr. Weasley himself."

"Oh." Harry tried to relax his tense shoulders, but Mrs. Malfoy seemed to know that was what he was doing, and gave him a single, affectionate squeeze before she let go.

"It's all right, Henry," she said. "You and Draco couldn't get along perfectly forever. You're siblings. It's natural for siblings to fight." She sounded like she was speaking from experience.

"Um. I wouldn't know."

"Of course not. But you will find that it will be fine."

Harry did his best to relax further as they arrived at the Apparition point outside the station. "Okay."

Mrs. Malfoy smiled down at him, and then they whirled in place and were gone.

* * *

"Henry! Mother wants to see you."

At least Draco didn't appear to think it was a good idea to talk about friends coming over for the summer any time soon. Harry looked up from his Potions essay and found his twin brother standing in the doorway of Harry's room, studying him intently. "All right." Harry put down his quill.

"Why are you holding your quill like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like you're trying to strangle it to death."

Harry bristled as he passed Draco. "Just because _some _of us were born able to buy quetzal-feather quills if we want—"

"You were, too!"

"It's not like I grew up knowing that, though, did I? It's not the same—quit _following _me."

"Mother thought you might not be able to find her rooms by yourself," Draco said, and sped up a little, as though he wanted to get in front of Harry. "You haven't been to this part of the house very often."

Harry shot him a skeptical glance, and then came to a stop altogether as they reached the bottom of a grand, sweeping staircase (there were _always _staircases like that in Malfoy Manor, from what Harry had been able to tell). There was a small creature standing in front of him and staring up at him with his mouth open.

"The Great Harry Potter is Henry Malfoy," whispered the elf.

"_Dobby_?"

"No, his name isn't Dobby," said Draco hastily, whipping around in front of Harry and standing tall as if he would be able to hide the house-elf from sight. That didn't work well with such a wide staircase, of course. Harry simply stepped to the side and stared at Dobby again. Draco hopped in front of him. "_His _name is—Shobby. Yes, that's it."

"No, I know Dobby," Harry said softly, his mind flying back to the summer before second year again and how Dobby had shown up at his relatives' house. Well, no, the Dursleys' house. He shook his head. Thinking of Lily and James Potter as his parents was still something he wasn't entirely over.

And then his mind snapped back to the far more disturbing evidence in front of him.

He narrowed his eyes at Draco. "Dobby said that his family was evil and treated him badly."

"Dobby would never be saying that about the great and noble Malfoyses!" Dobby exclaimed.

Harry blinked at Dobby, and Dobby held out his hands with a pleading expression. Harry understood _that_ well enough, at least. It was the way he had sometimes looked when one of his primary teachers noticed something out of the ordinary at the Dursleys' and tried to help him. Dobby didn't think Harry could do anything, and he was begging Harry not to get him in trouble.

"Boys, what is the matter?"

And now Mrs. Malfoy was climbing the stairs from the bottom, her frown faint and reminding Harry of the kind that Aunt Petunia would wear when someone mentioned Harry in public. Dobby squeaked and bowed and began to wring his ears. Draco sighed as if he thought that meant the problem was solved and darted over to stand at his mother's side.

Harry folded his arms.

"_You _were the ones who were going to do something evil at Hogwarts and mistrusted Dobby?"

Mrs. Malfoy reached out a hand. "Henry, darling—"

"Did you mistreat him?" Harry backed up and away a step. He glanced over his shoulder, quickly, but then quickly back towards Mrs. Malfoy, because he had figured out what happened when he removed his eyes for too long a time from someone in front of him. "Dobby said that his masters would punish him for warning me, and that they were cruel. What did you _do _to him?"

"Nothing," Mrs. Malfoy said. "Truly, Henry, my word. House-elves are—formed such that they punish themselves when upset. What Dobby got upset with, I don't know. Why he would have sought you out in the middle of a Muggle neighborhood…" She shook her head.

Harry narrowed his eyes. Last year, the subtleties of what she was saying would have passed him right by, but not anymore. "Just because you don't know doesn't mean you can't _guess. _And you didn't actually finish the sentence about why he would have tried to find me when I lived with Muggles."

"Henry—"

"Dobby," Harry said strongly, staring past Mrs. Malfoy's shoulder at the elf, "can you answer me now that _I'm _a Malfoy? What was the evil plot?"

Dobby slowly stopped twisting his ears and looked up at Harry. His eyes quivered as much as the rest of his face, and then big tears slipped out of them and down his face. He flung himself on the ground and started wailing, beating his fists on the carpet.

Harry grimaced. That hadn't been what he meant to do, and he hurried down the steps and caught Dobby's fists. Dobby nearly kicked him in the jaw before he seemed to get control of himself and stop moving, but then he sniffled and stared at Harry in tragic silence.

"Are you still under orders not to speak about it?" That was the only thing Harry could think of that would make Dobby behave like this now that Harry was part of the same family.

Dobby nodded, looking relieved. "Dobby wishes he could to the young Master Malfoy, who was the Great Harry Potter!" he said, and then made a motion of locking his lips with a key. "But Big Master Malfoy—"

"Dobby."

That was Mrs. Malfoy's voice, and Harry shivered a little from how cold it was. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Mrs. Malfoy staring at Dobby, her hand clenched down on Draco's shoulder as if she thought that she would have to keep him from moving and going to Harry. Harry didn't think Draco would actually try, though. He looked frozen with shock.

"That will be all, Dobby. You may go."

Dobby bowed his head and vanished from his lying position on the carpet. Harry turned around to face his mother and brother again.

And yeah, they were still his, even though Harry could feel a sick, dizzying spiral in the middle of his chest and head. They weren't good people. He should have known that no relatives of his could actually be good people, he told himself. The Dursleys weren't, and the Potters were kidnappers, and the Malfoys hurt house-elves.

He should have known. He was cursed. He was tainted. Nothing _good _ever came his way.

"Henry," Mrs. Malfoy whispered.

"Narcissa? What is going on?"

Mr. Malfoy appeared at the bottom of the stairs, a tense frown on his face. Harry glared at him and said the first thing that came into his head. "So how often do you make the house-elves punish themselves?"

Mr. Malfoy twitched a little, but only a little. They were all so alike, Harry thought. All the Malfoys. The _other _Malfoys. Cold and frozen and beautiful.

Not him. He wasn't like that, no matter how much he might look like it. And again the sick spiral threatened to dump him on the floor.

He'd wanted a family. And that didn't work out, of course, because it _never _did.

"I do not often need to do so," Mr. Malfoy said. "Many of our servants anticipate our needs perfectly and never need to be punished."

"Dobby, though," Harry said flatly. "You told him to not to talk to me about whatever evil plot he wanted to report to me—which means there _was _something. He's not just making it up. What was it, _Mr. Malfoy_?"

"I had hoped you were past the point of childish behavior in which you attempted to distance yourself from me with that name, Henry."

Harry laughed wildly as the house spun around him again. "_Harry_. It's _Harry_. I should have known this is what would happen. You still aren't answering my questions, and you hurt the people who cook and clean for you—you're like the Dursleys!"

A stormcloud came and went over Mr. Malfoy's face. Then he said, "If you come into my study, I will tell you all about it."

"Why do you mistreat house-elves?"

"House-elves are servants. They are meant to—"

"That's what the Dursleys said about _me._"

A wave of something pure and cold seemed to move through Harry, and then struck out from him. The stained-glass window that overlooked the staircase abruptly shattered, shards of red and blue and green flying through the air and scattering around them like the petals of an unfolding flower.

Mr. Malfoy shouted something incoherent and jerked his wand up. There was a dome of blue light over his head in half a second, and then it extended over Harry and Mrs. Malfoy and Draco. Harry watched the shards of glass falling around them in soft pattering twinkles of dust, and felt nothing.

"Henry."

Mr. Malfoy's voice was frozen, again. Harry looked at him, and felt none of the apprehension he would have felt that morning if his father was angry at him.

"With me."

Mr. Malfoy walked towards his study. Harry knew, because Draco had told him, that it was the room where punishments were assigned and scoldings took place. Draco had made it sound like the scoldings were worse than the punishments.

Harry walked behind Mr. Malfoy, and felt nothing at all.


	8. A Godfather Like Him, Part Two

Thank you for all the reviews!

_Part Two_

"You must know this is an unacceptable way to behave.'

Harry kept silent, staring over Mr. Malfoy's head and out the window of the study. It was enchanted to give some kind of view of a winter forest under a blanket of silver snow. Harry wished that he could be like that. Frozen and still, instead of already sick and wanting to shout again. The numbness that had overcome him when they were on their way to the study had already left him again.

"Henry, are you listening to me?"

"Yes. It's an unacceptable way to behave," Harry droned.

That had always been enough to get him out of trouble with Uncle Vernon, but Mr. Malfoy narrowed his eyes and leaned forwards from behind the huge ebony desk where he probably plotted the kind of evil deeds that Dobby had tried to warn him about. "I want you to understand what I mean."

"I understand that exploding your windows makes you angrier than endangering students at Hogwarts does, sure."

Mr. Malfoy pursed his lips and closed his eyes, exhaling hard. Then, utterly startling Harry, he stood up from behind the desk and gestured to the sleek silver couch on the other side of the study, the same color as the image of the forest outside the window.

Harry went and sat on it, his face pinched. Maybe that made him look more like a real Malfoy. But he still didn't _feel _that way.

Mr. Malfoy sat on the couch next to him. He bent down and peered into Harry's eyes. Harry stared back and tried his best to put all his disgust and anger into the glare.

They treated Dobby the way the Dursleys used to treat _him_. If they thought one thing was wrong, they should think the other thing was wrong, too. But they weren't falling all over themselves to tell _Dobby _that he had to see a Mind-Healer. And Harry thought they would have kept him from seeing Dobby forever if they could.

The anger built and beat under his breastbone, and Mr. Malfoy's desk began to tremble.

"Listen to me, Henry," Mr. Malfoy said softly, and took his hand. Harry started, and the magic faded away. Mr. Malfoy kept staring intently at him.

"Yes," Mr. Malfoy said.

"Yes, what?"

"Yes, I was plotting something to do with the school," Mr. Malfoy said, and sighed. "At the time, it—made sense. It would have caused the kind of chaos that would distract certain enemies in the Ministry from our family, and it would have discredited someone I hate. And it would have…" He hesitated for so long that Harry thought he wouldn't start speaking again, but finally he did. "It would have made the Dark Lord look on us with favor."

Harry ripped his hand away, but Mr. Malfoy didn't move. He kept sitting there and staring, and Harry hated it. For the first time in his life, he appreciated the fact that the Dursleys had sent him to his cupboard when he got angry at them. It meant it was easier to think and unwind in the darkness.

He couldn't get _away _with Mr. Malfoy staring at him like this. Harry clenched his hands into fists in his lap and threw his words like curses instead. "So, how soon are you going to turn me over to him?"

Mr. Malfoy's eyes closed. "I would never do that to a child of mine, Henry."

"Yes, you would."

"I have asked you before to think before you speak—"

"You did your plot, whatever it was, with Draco _right in the school_," Harry snapped at him. "How did you know it wouldn't hurt him?"

Mr. Malfoy's eyes opened, and he stared down at Harry for a long moment. He was probably thinking before he spoke, Harry thought, unable not to feel the boil of fury through his veins.

"I—was led to believe that the object would only hurt those who were of half blood or less," said Mr. Malfoy at last.

"And you didn't care about me when you thought I was the Potters' child."

"No." Mr. Malfoy swallowed. "I hated you."

Harry nodded. His fury had changed. He felt odd, light, floating, airy. It was as if a horrible thing had happened, but it was almost a relief, because he'd been anticipating the horrible thing so long and now it had happened and it couldn't hurt him anymore.

"You hated me, and you hate me now."

"_What_? No—"

"You tried to keep the fact that you treat house-elves horribly away from me." Harry stared at him, and his eyes were bright and tearless, and he spoke the words without knowing he was going to speak them. "Instead of changing the way that you treat house-elves, or your opinion about people who are half-bloods or Muggleborns, you just tried to keep me away from the elves and took the object, whatever it was, out of the school. You didn't really change at all. I should have known, I suppose."

"I am turning away from the Dark Lord. For you."

Harry kept talking, while Mr. Malfoy's words were like a blow that he stepped aside from. "It doesn't really matter. I never had anyone who loved me growing up. It turns out that my parents, I mean, the people I thought were my parents, were my kidnappers. And now you don't really want to change. You're making the smallest changes possible. That's okay. I can live with this."

"_Henry. _Please."

Mr. Malfoy sounded agonized, but Harry just looked at him and shook his head. "I'm not important enough to make the big changes for."

"That is not true." Mr. Malfoy reached out and put his arms around Harry, but this time, it didn't feel like a father hugging him. Nothing could get through the bright shell that had wrapped around Harry. "I love you. I have always longed for you. We told Draco stories of you when we thought that was all we would ever have, so that he could get to know you, too."

"You loved the person you thought I was," Harry corrected him. "Someone who was a pureblood and would be happy to live with the way you treated house-elves and whatever plot you were cooking up to put in the school. Something to do with Heir of Slytherin, I suppose?" he sighed, disappointed with himself for not seeing it earlier. "The Petrifications stopped after Christmas. When you took whatever it was out of the school."

"Henry."

"Are you going to treat house-elves better?"

Mr. Malfoy hesitated.

Harry stood up, and shrugged Mr. Malfoy's arms off him, and walked out of the room.

* * *

"You can't stay in there forever, Henry."

"Watch me."

Harry said the words flatly, staring up at the ceiling of his room. He hadn't decorated it with all the things he would have liked, but so what? The Malfoys weren't his family, not really.

"You have to _eat _something."

"I'm using to doing without."

From the sound of it, Draco had kicked the door. Harry entertained a brief fantasy of Mrs. Malfoy getting angry at him for the dent he had probably put in the door, and then snorted to himself. Who said it would last? The house-elves would come along and magic it away, and if it did stay for some weird reason, then Mrs. Malfoy would blame Harry.

Because they did. They blamed him for seeing Dobby and caring about him, instead of blaming themselves for not treating Dobby the right way and trying to hide him from Harry.

Footsteps down the corridor said that Draco was going away, and Harry tried to close his eyes and sleep, even though he _was _hungry. But a loud pop sounded in front of him, and Harry scrambled over and reached for the wand under his pillow.

Dobby was there, bowing, holding a tray full of what looked like bowls of soup and a covered platter that smelled like chicken. Harry licked his lips and said, "I'm not hungry," while his stomach growled.

"Great Master Harry Potter is being hungry," Dobby said, in a voice that sounded like experience, and set the tray down on the table next to his bed. "Perhaps Great Master Harry Potter can be eating something? For Dobby?"

House-elves sure had big green teary eyes when they wanted to use them, Harry thought grumpily. He lifted the cover off the platter and swallowed when he saw the chicken sitting there, in delicate bits draped with some kind of sauce that made them smell like a few meals he'd cooked for the Dursleys that he never got to eat.

"Do you swear that they haven't put any curses or potions on the food?" he asked Dobby without taking his eyes from the chicken, or the fork that had materialized beside the platter. He was sure that it hadn't been there a second before.

"They are not putting anything in the food! Theys never come in the kitchens."

Well, at least that made sense, Harry thought as he picked up the fork. Preparing food was probably beneath a Malfoy.

And didn't that prove that he _wasn't _one?

Harry sighed, but he was hungry enough that he ate some of the chicken and a small piece of the treacle tart. As soon as he'd eaten enough food that he didn't think his stomach would grumble, he put the fork down.

"Great Master Harry Potter is not wanting more?"

Harry shook his head as he turned to Dobby. "I have to show them they can't manipulate me this way. And why are you calling me Harry Potter?"

Dobby froze and then clapped a hand over his eyes. "Does Great Master—does he not wants me to?"

"No. Right now, I prefer it." Harry sighed and looked off at the wall, at the enchanted window that showed a vision of the ocean. He'd set it that way thinking he might find the roll of the waves soothing, but it hadn't happened.

"Dobby, what do they do to you?"

Dobby cautiously came forwards and stood staring up at him. Harry looked back down, and nodded encouragingly. "I know that you can't tell me anything about the evil plot in the school. I'm not asking that. I'm just asking how the Malfoys treat you."

Dobby swallowed. "They bes getting upset when Dobby be being stupid and slow. They tells Dobby to shut his ears in the oven and his fingers in doors. And they gets upset if Dobby spill the tea. They tells him that he's a bad elf and send him off to sit in the elf quarters in the kitchen and think about what he's done."

"What are the elf quarters like?"

"Cold. And dark."

_Like the cupboard._

Harry felt the sickening spiral of emotion unfolding in the center of his chest again, but this time, it was a lot colder. Like the cupboard. Like the elf quarters. And ready to burst into flame again at a moment's notice.

"Thank you, Dobby," he said. "I'm going to try and do something to get this changed. They don't have the right to treat you like that, or the other elves."

"Master Harry Potter must not be doing that!" Dobby whispered at once, harshly, his eyes darting around as if he thought one of the walls was going to come to life and hurt him. "The Masters Malfoy would be knowing that you is knowing, and—and—"

"You think they would make it worse for you?" Harry asked. He could understand that. The Dursleys had reacted like that when they thought someone had figured out what Harry's home life was like, even though no one had ever cared enough to actually _help him._

Harry tried to stuff the bitterness back into its own cupboard in his mind, but it was hard.

Dobby bobbed his head so fast that the tears forming in his eyes flew away and landed on the floor.

"All right, I won't do that," Harry said, and reached out to pat Dobby on the head, ignoring the way that he immediately burst into wails of adoration. There was a time that he might have done the same thing, if someone had ever cared enough to pay attention. "But I'll figure out some way, okay?"

"Master Harry Potter is being great," Dobby breathed, and then he picked up the tray and vanished with it.

Harry lay back on his bed and scowled at the ceiling. Now he just had to figure out what the best thing to do would be. Should he ask for Dobby to be his personal elf? Or would it be better if Dobby was permanently free and could leave behind Malfoy Manor forever?

A wave of homesickness washed over him—for Hogwarts, nowhere else. The Dursleys' house had never been home.

But more and more, it was seeming as if Malfoy Manor probably wasn't, either.

* * *

"Mind-Healer Letham has been waiting on you for the past half-hour."

Mrs. Malfoy's words were probably meant to be a gentle scold, but Harry could only hear echoes of all the times that Aunt Petunia had ever said he'd disappointed her and the like. He nodded back to Mrs. Malfoy and walked into the small grey sitting room where it seemed the Mind-Healer was.

It was a surprise to find out that the Mind-Healer was a woman, even though Harry hadn't heard her first name. He'd just assumed "Healer Letham" had to be a man. He took a deep breath and walked towards her through the low grey couches and stuffed chairs, trying not to compare her to Mrs. Figg, even though she looked about the same age and had grey hair.

No smell of cats around her, though. At least there was that.

And then the woman glanced up as Harry came to a halt in front of the couch where she was sitting, and he only barely kept from jerking back. Her eyes were a piercing, clear blue, and she looked at him as if she was going to use her eyes like spoons and scoop the inside of his head out.

No. Definitely not like Mrs. Figg.

"Mr. Malfoy? A pleasure to meet you." The woman gave him an odd, shallow bow without rising from the couch. "My name is Marianna Letham. I'm pleased that you could join me."

Harry flushed, although he didn't actually hear sarcasm in those last words. "Um. Yes, Healer Letham. Thank you."

He found himself glancing over his shoulder at Mrs. Malfoy for reassurance, then remembered that he was angry at all of them and he shouldn't be doing that. He jerked his eyes back around, and heard his "mother" sigh a little and retreat. The door of the sitting room closed, and Harry stared at Healer Letham and wondered where she worked.

It occurred to him that that was a good question, especially if the Malfoys were paying her to be here and wanted her to "heal him" of certain things. So he sat down and asked.

"I used to work for St. Mungo's," said Healer Letham, rearranging herself a little so that she was sitting with one leg tucked up beneath her and the other dangling down towards the floor. It looked uncomfortable for a woman her age, but Harry wasn't going to mention it if she wanted to sit that way. "But they wanted me to treat too many people who hadn't a thing wrong with their heads, who were cursed and should have been seen by the Healers in the Spell Damage Ward. So I left and became a private Mind-Healer working with children."

"That doesn't make sense, though. Why would they want you to work with people who were cursed?"

Healer Letham snorted. "Politics. I had a high rate of success with my patients, so they thought that meant I should be willing to heal rich idiots, and idiots high in the Ministry. No matter what was wrong with them."

"Oh." Harry folded his arms. "Well, I don't have anything wrong with me."

Healer Letham studied him. "No, I don't think that's true."

"How would _you _know? You didn't cast a diagnostic charm or anything!"

"No. But I know the signs. You sit on that chair as though the whole world wronged you. And, well, at your age, that doesn't usually happen unless you have some amount of trauma."

"You _know _that Voldemort killed my adoptive parents when I was one, right?"

"And I know that you never received treatment or healing for it, if you're sitting like that."

Harry paused. She hadn't flinched when he said Voldemort's name. That was actually pretty good. Or good enough to make him give her a chance.

"Well, no," he admitted. "I don't think anyone thought I should. I didn't even know I was a wizard until about two years ago. My relatives are Muggles. They wouldn't have thought to take me to a Mind-Healer."

"Or a Muggle equivalent? I know they exist. And I must admit I am curious how a Malfoy comes to have recent relatives in the Muggle world."

Harry flushed. "I mean—they're not really my aunt and uncle and cousin. I know that now. Not related by blood. But I thought they were at the time. I thought I was the child of James and Lily Potter."

Healer Letham nodded as if that had clarified something for her. "Very well. So you didn't receive treatment or healing from any trauma that you endured when your adoptive parents died. And what was living with your Muggles like?"

Harry flinched before he could stop himself. He knew Healer Letham would have seen it, but he still said, "Fine. Not great, but fine."

Healer Letham gave him a direct stare. "You seem like an intelligent young man, so we both know that's not true."

"Well, _here _isn't any better!" Harry snapped. "The Malfoys don't make me do chores like the Dursleys did, but they make the house-elves do it! And the house-elves _beat _themselves! And they were going to do something, I don't know what, at Hogwarts! And Mr. Malfoy followed Voldemort. He claims he was under Imperius, but I don't believe it."

Healer Letham leaned forwards. "Neither do I," she said in a loud whisper.

Harry's mouth fell open, and then he found himself giggling without thinking about it. He leaned back on the chair a little, and studied the Healer at more length. She smiled back at him, not entirely at ease, but calm. Calm was better than most people in the house had been for the last few days, Harry thought. Draco shouted every time he tried to talk to Harry, Mr. Malfoy kept making excuses, Mrs. Malfoy was sad and tried to make him talk about other things, and Dobby cried every time Harry saw him.

"Why are you saying that?" he asked. "Don't you work for the Malfoys?"

"They're paying me. I work for _you_. I'm on your side against them, if you need me to be. And I find it interesting that you don't see yourself as one of them."

Harry looked away for a second. Then he said, "They've been—they really want me, but it's not the me I really am."

"What do they want?"

"Someone who doesn't sympathize with house-elves. Someone who didn't grow up in the Muggle world. Someone who wasn't adopted by the Potters. Someone who isn't a Gryffindor. Someone who _feels _like a pureblood." Harry rushed the words out, and then turned back to her. "Mr. Malfoy even said that he hated me when I was still Harry Potter."

"Yes?"

Healer Letham seemed calm about it, which Harry couldn't understand. He stared at her. "He hated me! How can he go from hating me and then start _liking _me in just a few months? He only likes the person he wants me to be."

"Ah." Healer Letham moved so that this time, her other foot was tucked up under her and the one that had been tucked was dangling towards the floor. "Well, keep in mind that they may have mythologized you in their own minds. In fact, from what your mother told me, that is exactly what happened. They didn't know where you had gone or what had happened to you, so they told stories about you, about what you might have been like. It's not easy to go from that to a living child, no matter how desperately happy you are to find him again."

"So I should feel sorry for _them_?"

"Not exactly," Healer Letham said, with that calmness that made Harry keep shutting up. "But let me say that I find it easy to believe both that your father could have hated you as a Potter, instantly loved you when he found out that you were his son, and now doesn't know how to deal with the middle."

"I don't know how to deal with it, either."

"I know. And I'm here to help you deal with it. We don't have to do anything right away. I fully expect this to be a process of many months."

"But you said that you work for me."

"Yes. What of it?"

"What if I tell you to go away?"

Healer Letham smiled at him again. "I'm on your side, and I'll fight for you—even against your own trauma that is keeping you from seeing how much you need healing." She held up a hand when Harry glared at her. "But any particular session that you want to end, we can end. Do you want to be done with this one?"

Harry fidgeted back and forth on the chair. He did and he didn't. He didn't like the thought of a Mind-Healer talking to him like he was some broken doll she was trying to piece back together, but on the other hand, this was the only time that he'd really got to _talk _to someone since finding out about Dobby.

He sighed. "I want to tell you about Dobby, and have you help me figure out how to help him."

"I can do that. Why don't you tell me more?"

* * *

Harry wandered slowly away from the Manor into the beautiful gardens, and sat down near a pond that had a curving, graceful fountain of white stone in the middle of it. It was shaped almost like a dolphin, but not completely. Not really. Harry sighed and shook his head. Sometimes he couldn't believe that he lived in a place so _rich._

He looked out into the gardens, and watched darkness creeping up among the trees and the flowers. He kept turning over what had happened with Healer Letham this afternoon in his mind, and what he was going to do in the morning.

Healer Letham had agreed that it was a good idea to ask Dobby to be his personal elf. Freeing him was possible, but she thought it would lead to more tension between him and the Malfoys than it would solve, and Dobby would have a hard time finding another place that he could go or a job he could hold.

So Harry would have to talk to Mr. Malfoy in the morning and ask about having Dobby assigned to him. And never hurt by anyone else ever again, or ordered to hurt himself.

_That _was going to be a fun conversation.

He watched the sunlight sink further and further, and admitted to himself, finally, that he did feel better after talking with Healer Letham. She hadn't miraculously cured him of anything—and he didn't think there was any cure for thinking of himself as Harry Potter, and he wouldn't want it if there was—but at least she agreed with him about some things.

And she had told him some things he could do about the Malfoys other than just getting Dobby for his elf. Harry was going to try that.

One of the white peacocks squawked and fled across the garden with its tail trailing behind it, beating its wings frantically and flying maybe a meter before landing again. Harry snickered. They really were ridiculous creatures, something Draco got defensive about every time Harry mentioned it.

"Are you Harry? Or the other one?"

Harry spun around, grabbing his wand from his robe pocket even though he knew he wasn't supposed to use magic over the summer. But there was someone out here who wasn't a house-elf or a Malfoy, and he knew that meant they weren't _supposed _to be here.

"Who is it?" he asked, his eyes darting around, and wishing for once that it wasn't so dark.

"_Lumos_."

A wand lit up, and there was a man sitting on the grass maybe three meters away from him, a horribly thin man with black hair hanging around his face. He looked at Harry with a kind of desperate, crazed hunger that made Harry swallow. His first thought was Voldemort, but he didn't look anything like the red eyes Harry had seen on the back of Professor Quirrell's head.

"I think you have to be Harry," whispered the man. "The other one would have run screaming for his Mummy and Daddy by now." He spat the last words, and his grey eyes lit up with a terrible contempt. He looked exactly the way Uncle Vernon always had when talking about foreigners.

Harry didn't know why he made the jump to the right conclusion. Except, maybe, that the eyes looked like Draco and Mrs. Malfoy's, and his when he looked into the mirror and got taken by surprise, and he knew Mrs. Malfoy was a Black.

"Are you Sirius Black?" he asked.

The man leaped back and transformed, in the middle of the leap, into a giant black dog. He streaked away into the darkness before Harry could even close his mouth.

Harry stared at where he'd sat. So Sirius Black had somehow escaped from Azkaban and then come onto the Malfoy property—the one with wards that he wasn't supposed to be able to cross, except did they keep dogs out?—and he'd betrayed the Potters and kidnapped Harry in the first place and he was _here._

Harry drew his breath in to yell.

Then, slowly, he closed his mouth again.

For someone who was mad, the man hadn't actually hurt him. And right now, Harry felt more like Harry Potter than he did a Malfoy.

Harry glanced back towards the Manor, and then got up and walked in that direction as he heard Mrs. Malfoy calling for him, but he kept his mouth shut and walked as though he hadn't just seen a crazed man turn into a dog and run away.

It had felt good to talk to Healer Letham and get some secrets out. But the Malfoys still hadn't apologized for keeping Dobby away from Harry, or lying to him about whatever the evil plot at Hogwarts had been.

Harry thought he was due a secret of his own.


End file.
